Barring a slowdown in our vaccination campaign or the emergence of an India-style mutation of the coronavirus, this pandemic will in all likelihood reach its conclusion sooner rather than later. But our next pandemic could prove to be bacterial instead of viral, and inadvertently, the coronavirus may have instigated it.
To make room for coronavirus testing and treatment, plenty of clinics that treat sexually transmitted diseases were forced shut by the lockdowns. As a result, screening for STDs plummeted over the past year. Compound that with the fact that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention just announced that STDs reached a record high in 2019, and the nation has an obvious problem.
STDs such as gonorrhea, once de facto death sentences a little more than a century ago, can now be cured immediately with cheap and accessible antibiotics. But the disease has become dangerously antibiotic-resistant, with both the CDC and the World Health Organization warning about “super gonorrhea.” Other STDs, such as chlamydia and syphilis, have also become more resistant to antibiotics.
Starting with Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin, scientists have long warned that the overuse of antibiotics could bring us to the end of the antibiotic era, but with an end to the COVID-19 pandemic in sight, doctors today are deeming antibiotic resistance as our next pandemic. While it’s difficult to hinder the transmission of some increasingly antibiotic-resistant bacteria such as Streptococcus pneumoniae and Staphylococcus aureus, STDs can be curbed by testing — which is exactly what slowed down in the past year.
The sexually active aren’t the only ones affected by this phenomenon. The CDC found that cases of congenital syphilis (that is, babies born with syphilis because of their untreated mothers) have nearly quadrupled since 2015. Nearly half of those babies will be stillborn or die as newborns, and those who survive can have severe birth defects such as deafness or deformed bones.
The nation had 2.6 million cases of STDs in 2019, and that was before the coronavirus hampered testing. The problem is likely much worse, lending greater odds to once-easily treatable diseases landing patients in a hospital, if not a grave. We may not have the obvious tools to halt the transmission of the increasingly antibiotic-resistant bacteria that cause pneumonia and meningitis — no, physicians becoming a little less trigger-happy with prescribing antibiotics have to do that — but on at least one, admittedly unsexy front, individuals have the power to prevent a potential next pandemic. And if the coronavirus taught us anything, it’s that the longer we wait, the worse it will be.
