Gonorrhea is a sexually transmitted disease, or STD, caused by the bacterium Neisseria gonorrhoeae. Common symptoms of the disease include painful urination and genital discharge. There are records of historical discussions of gonorrhea in ancient civilizations and during the Middle Ages, but scientists did not begin investigating the scientific causes and treatments of the STD until the sixteenth century. In the 1700s, physicians attributed gonorrhea to the same cause as another STD, syphilis. Later, in the 1800s, researchers discovered the two diseases were not the same and identified the bacteria N. gonorrhoeae that causes gonorrhea. By the 1900s, researchers began using antibiotics to target the bacteria, but many drugs eventually developed antibiotic resistance. In 2020, the World Health Organization, or WHO, estimated that 82.4 million individuals contracted gonorrhea globally, and as of 2024, researchers continue to experiment with various antibiotic drugs to provide adequate treatment for the disease.

In 1944, Joseph Earl Moore and colleagues published “The Treatment of Early Syphilis with Penicillin: A Preliminary Report of 1418 Cases,” hereafter “Treatment of Early Syphilis,” in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Moore and colleagues’ article was one of the first to study and explore the use of penicillin, an antibiotic that can kill bacteria, as a treatment for humans with syphilis, which is a bacterial disease that spreads through sexual contact. In its early stages, syphilis can cause rashes and genital sores, but in its late stages, it can also lead to organ damage. In “Treatment of Early Syphilis,” Moore and his colleagues explain that they conducted a study to determine the effects and optimal dose of penicillin in humans with early syphilis. The authors found that giving individuals with syphilis specific doses of penicillin can heal their syphilitic lesions and eradicate the bacterium that causes syphilis from their bodies. “Treatment of Early Syphilis” was one of the first articles to demonstrate that syphilis, specifically early syphilis, could be effectively treated with penicillin, the drug that physicians still most commonly use as of 2024 to treat the sexually transmitted disease.

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.