Word: gonococci
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While routinely examining a vaginal swab from a woman infected with gonorrhea, Dr. Ian Phillips of London's St. Thomas's Hospital made an alarming discovery: the swab contained a strain of gonococci, or gonorrhea-causing bacteria, unlike any that Phillips had ever seen before in his laboratory. The bean-shaped bugs not only were totally resistant to penicillin-the medication generally employed against this common and often dangerous venereal disease-but actually seemed to thrive in its presence...
...Gonorrhea now rates as America's most urgent public health problem, and officials have urged routine screening to detect the hundreds of thousands of new cases each year. But detection is often difficult, especially in women. Gonococci, the germs of gonorrhea, flourish and multiply astronomically in human genitalia, but are difficult to preserve for laboratory test cultures. The organisms are sensitive to air and often die by the time a specimen reaches a lab technician. Now Smith Kline and French Laboratories have devised a simple, self-contained test that physicians can perform in their own offices. The doctor takes...
Despite these difficulties, gonorrhea can be conquered, said Dr. William J. Brown of PHS's Communicable Disease Center, if only it can be detected promptly and surely. With a man, this is no problem once he goes to a doctor. In a woman, the gonococci may spread and hide, or mingle with other germs to make diagnosis extremely difficult. In the new detection method described by Dr. Brown, the gonococci are made fluorescent and visible through a microscope under ultraviolet light only a few minutes after a smear is taken from a patient. Hospitals across...
...they examined over a thousand inmates of New York State's model Attica Prison. Of these, 392 had once had gonorrhea. All had been discharged by doctors as cured. When the bacteriologists made careful germ cultures from their patients' specimens, they found that eleven men still harbored gonococci...
...Rochester scientists urged that physicians should remember two vital facts: 1) gonococci quickly develop resistance to sulfanilamide and its relative sulfapyridine, even when these drugs are given in increasing amounts; 2) only sure test of the presence of tricky gonococci is careful laboratory culture...