In case you were thinking about heading to Britain and having a ton of unprotected sex—don't! Because the United Kingdom's Health Protection Agency believes that its septic little archipelago is "heading to a point when [gonorrhea] is incurable unless new treatments can be found."

That's the upshot of the HPA's order to ditch the main treatment for gonorrhea—the antibiotic cefixime—in favor of two more powerful antibiotics, after increasing levels of resistance to the cefixime. The antibiotic is the latest in a long line to have been put aside in the face of the ever-adaptable clap (penicillin, tetracyclines, and ciprofloxacin were each, at one point, the first line of defense), and doctors are worried that pretty soon gonorrhea won't be treatable at all.

Prof Cathy Ison, a gonorrhoea expert [Just like your mom! — Ed.] at England's HPA, said: "Our lab tests have shown a dramatic reduction in the sensitivity of the drug we were using as the main treatment for gonorrhoea. This presents the very real threat of untreatable gonorrhoea in the future.

Looks like the UK is going to lose a lot of that lucrative sex tourism money!

[BBC]