page_title: Gonorrhea
section_title: Antibiotics
hierarchical_section_title: Gonorrhea / Treatment / Antibiotics
caption_attribution_description: A poster attached to a curbside mailbox offering advice to World War II servicemen: Penicillin cures gonorrhea in 4 hours.
context_page_description: Gonorrhea, colloquially known as the clap, is a sexually transmitted infection caused by the bacterium Neisseria gonorrhoeae. Infection may involve the genitals, mouth, and/or rectum. Infected men may experience pain or burning with urination, discharge from the penis, or testicular pain. Infected women may experience burning with urination, vaginal discharge, vaginal bleeding between periods, or pelvic pain. Complications in women include pelvic inflammatory disease and in men include inflammation of the epididymis. Many of those infected, however, have no symptoms. If untreated, gonorrhea can spread to joints or heart valves.
  Gonorrhea is spread through sexual contact with an infected person. This includes oral, anal, and vaginal sex. It can also spread from a mother to a child during birth. Diagnosis is by testing the urine, urethra in males, or cervix in females. Testing all women who are sexually active and less than 25 years of age each year as well as those with new sexual partners is recommended; the same recommendation applies in men who have sex with men.
context_section_description: Antibiotics are used to treat gonorrhea infections. As of 2016, both ceftriaxone by injection and azithromycin by mouth are most effective. However, due to increasing rates of antibiotic resistance, local susceptibility patterns must be taken into account when deciding on treatment.
  Adults may have eyes infected with gonorrhoea and require proper personal hygiene and medications. Addition of topical antibiotics have not been shown to improve cure rates compared to oral antibiotics alone in treatment of eye infected gonorrhea. For newborns, erythromycin ointment is recommended as a preventative measure for gonococcal infant conjunctivitis. Among persons in the United States between 14 and 39 years of age, 46% of people with gonorrheal infection also have chlamydial infection.
  Infections of the throat can be especially problematic, as antibiotics have difficulty becoming sufficiently concentrated there to destroy the bacteria. This is amplified by the fact that pharyngeal gonorrhoea is mostly asymptomatic, and gonococci and commensal Neisseria species can coexist for long time periods in the pharynx and share anti-microbial resistance genes. Accordingly, an enhanced focus on early detection (i.e., screening of high-risk populations, such as men who have sex with men, PCR testing should be considered) and appropriate treatment of pharyngeal gonorrhoea is important.
caption: Penicillin entered mass production in 1944 and revolutionized the treatment of several venereal diseases.
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