Drug resistant gonorrhoea — is India monitoring?

The WHO this week declared drug-resistant gonorrhoea to be a global emergency (this link is to a good report in Wired magazine). The main Indian dailies covered the story but no-one splashed on it because India was not one of the countries mentioned in the list of places where resistant gonorrhoea has been discovered. Given what we know about antibiotic resistance to other diseases, this is probably a gap in the monitoring rather than a bill of clean health for India. If you want to be really worried, look at this 80-page 2011 report from a group chaired by Prof N.K. Ganguly (former Director General of ICMR) which highlights the amount that is simply not known. This going forward blindly is not just an Indian phenomenon: in this Forbes piece from two days ago, the WHO’s Dr. Manjula Lusti-Narasimhan said that “the available data only shows the tip of the iceberg. Without adequate surveillance we won’t know the extent of resistance to gonorrhoea.”