America’s top health authority has encouraged people to take a post-sex – ‘morning after’ – pill to combat the nation’s soaring rates of chlamydia, gonorrhoea and syphilis.
The drug, called doxycycline, is a cheap antibiotic which has been sold for more than 50 years to treat dental infections and skin conditions.
The Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) raised the alarm on Tuesday that sexually transmitted infections (STIs) have been rising across the US in recent years. Rates of gonorrhoea have notably increased by 118 per cent from an historic low in 2009, the agency said.
In a bid to turn the tide, the CDC is drafting recommendations to use doxycycline in the same way that the morning after pill is taken after unprotected sex, said Dr Leandro Mena, the director of the agency’s STI prevention division.
A study published last week of 500 gay and bisexual men and transgender women found that those taking doxycycline were around 90 per cent less likely to get chlamydia, 80 per cent less likely to catch syphilis, and more than 50 per cent less likely to get gonorrhoea compared with those who did not take the drug after sex.
“Sexually transmitted infections are an enormous, low-priority public health problem. And they’ve been a low-priority problem for decades, in spite of the fact that they are the most commonly reported kind of infectious disease,” said Dr John Douglas Jr, a lecturer at the Colorado School of Public Health.
The data released on Tuesday showed that in 2021, the rate of chlamydia increased by 3.9 per cent compared to the previous year. Rates of reported gonorrhoea have more than doubled over the past 13 years, the agency added.
Experts attribute the rise in STIs to declining condom use, inadequate sex education and reduced testing during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The San Francisco Department of Public Health became the first US health department to issue guidance about doxycycline as an infection-prevention measure in October.
“We do need new approaches, new innovations” to help bring STIs under control, said Dr Philip Andrew Chan, who is consulting with the CDC on the doxycycline recommendations.
However, antimicrobial resistance experts have hit back at the proposals. Widespread use of doxycycline as a preventive measure could contribute to mutations that make bacteria resistant to the drug, they warned.
The CDC will also have to weigh the side effects of the drug, which include stomach problems and rashes after sun exposure.
The move mirrors that of Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis [PrEP], which is taken to reduce the chances of catching HIV. On-demand PrEP involves taking several pills both before and after a possible sexual exposure to HIV.
PrEP reduces the risk of catching HIV from sex by about 99 per cent when taken as prescribed.
