Between 1935 and 1937, Leonard Colebrook showed that sulfonamides, a class of antibacterial drugs, worked as an effective treatment for puerperal fever. Puerperal fever is a bacterial infection that can occur in the uterus of women after giving birth. At the time of Colebrook’s study, puerperal fever remained a common disease due to both the lack of hygienic practices in hospitals and a treatment for the disease. After successfully using Prontosil, a sulfanilamide, to cure a patient who was going to die from puerperal fever, Colebrook began experiments with the drug. He successfully treated patients with puerperal fever with sulfonamides, specifically Prontosil and sulfanilamide. Colebrook conducted the experiment from 1935 to 1936 primarily at the Queen Charlotte’s Hospital in London, England. After Colebrook’s success using antibacterial drugs in treating puerperal fever, use of antibacterial drugs became widespread in developed countries and, by the 1950s, it had made maternal deaths rare in those countries.

In July 2011, Makoto Ohnishi and colleagues published the article “Is Neisseria gonorrhoeae Initiating a Future Era of Untreatable Gonorrhea?: Detailed Characterization of the First Strain with High-Level Resistance to Ceftriaxone,” hereafter, “Untreatable Gonorrhea,” in the journal Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy. Gonorrhea is a sexually transmitted disease, or STD, caused by the bacterium Neisseria gonorrhoeae. In 2009, Ohnishi and a few of his co-authors found the first ceftriaxone-resistant strain of gonorrhea, called H041. That strain demonstrated resistance to ceftriaxone, one of the last remaining and effective first-line antibiotic treatment drugs for N. gonorrhoeae. In “Untreatable Gonorrhea,” Ohnishi and Colleagues confirm that the H041 strain is resistant to ceftriaxone and analyze the bacterium’s mechanism of resistance. “Untreatable Gonorrhea” was one of the first publications to characterize the H041strain and highlights a need for global public health interventions to prevent the rapid spread of gonorrhea.