Editors' note: This story has been updated to more clearly attribute phrasing from work previously published in U.S. News & World Report.
The CDC is reporting that a slew of "incurable," antibiotic resistant gonorrhea cases have been reported in North America.
Last year, the World Health Organization and Centers For Disease Control And Prevention warned that incurable Gonorrhea would soon be a reality.
Before now, incurable instances of gonorrhea had been found largely in the United Kingdom, Austria, France, Norway, and Japan.
According to U.S. News & World Report, "Public Health Ontario found that 6.7 percent of patients with gonorrhea at a Toronto clinic still had the disease after a round of cephalosporin treatment."
Cephalosporin is an oral antibiotic that at the moment is the last effective treatment for patients who've contracted the disease.
"Gonorrhea is estimated to infect close to 700,000 Americans each year," reports U.S. News & World Report. "Symptoms include painful urination, abdominal pain, genital discharge, itching, and infertility in women."
In a recent study released in the National Library Of Medicine, a team of Japanese and Swedish scientists described the new unbeatable strain as "a true superbug that initiates a future era of untreatable gonorrhea."
(Sources: U.S. News & World Report, Clevelandleader, NYTimes Blog)