At present, doctors can prescribe medications that can cure gonorrhoea, a disease that can be transmitted sexually both to men and women.
A British health expert, however, has issued a warning about the rise of a more powerful strain of what is being described as "super-gonorrhoea," which may render this disease incurable in the future.
England's chief medical officer Dame Sally Davies recently told medical practitioners and pharmacists in the country, advising them to always make sure that they are prescribing the correct drugs to gonorrhoea patients.
Davies gave this reminder after receiving complaints from some gonorrhoea patients that they were not receiving the correct antibiotics to cure them of the sexually transmitted infection.
In the letter, the British health expert also admitted that the disease is becoming harder and harder to treat, and that certain strains of the disease are becoming resistant to drugs.
"Gonorrhoea is at risk of becoming an untreatable disease due to the continuing emergence of antimicrobial resistance," Davies was quoted by BBC as saying.
Sexual health doctors and even the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) earlier said that gonorrhoea is rapidly developing resistance to current commercially available cures like the antibiotic azithromycin, which is normally taken with another drug, ceftriaxone.
"The emergence of drug-resistant gonorrhoea would significantly complicate the ability of providers to treat gonorrhoea successfully, since we have few antibiotic options left that are simple, well-studied, well-tolerated and highly effective," the CDC said on its website.
Just last March, a highly drug-resistant strain of gonorrhoea was detected in the north of England, where the disease is the second most common sexually transmitted infection.
In the letter, Davies also said that "it is extremely important that suboptimal treatment does not occur."
"Gonorrhoea has rapidly acquired resistance to new antibiotics, leaving few alternatives to the current recommendations," she said.
