New data debuted by the Europe’s infectious disease agency has revealed that cases of certain bacterial sexually transmitted infections (STIs) reached a ten-year high in 2024 as healthcare systems grapple with testing and prevention gaps.
According to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control’s (ECDC) Annual Epidemiological report, gonorrhoea cases saw a notable uptick in 2024, with 106,331 confirmed cases across the continent – more than quadrupling the infection rate observed in 2015.
Go deeper with GlobalData
Discover B2B Marketing That Performs
Combine business intelligence and editorial excellence to reach engaged professionals across 36 leading media platforms.
It was a similar case for syphilis, with diagnoses more than doubling to 45,577 during 2024 – with cases soaring by nearly 80% in heterosexual women at a reproductive age. According to Bruno Ciancio, head of the ECDC’s directly transmitted and vaccine-preventable diseases, this trend is particularly concerning as the disease can be passed directly to newborns – leading to “potentially lifelong complications.”
While transmission trends vary between different population groups, data reveals that men who have sex with men are the most disproportionately impacted by both gonorrhoea and syphilis, as they have traditionally seen the sharpest long-term increases in cases of these STIs.
With STI cases on the rise in Europe, the ECDC has called for greater accessibility to prevention services such as pre-birth screening, as well as easier access to initial, follow-up and repeat testing and faster treatment to turn these figures around. The agency also directed public health authorities to strengthen surveillance and facilitate the accurate monitoring of prevention efforts.
Treating STIs on a global scale
Currently, patients with bacterial STIs are treated with a round of antibiotics – typically ceftriaxone for gonorrhoea and penicillin for syphilis.
However, as the uptake of antibiotics continues to rise across the globe, some disease-causing bacterial strains have developed high-level resistance to standard of care (SoC) options, resulting in ‘super strains’ that are typically much harder to treat.
Despite this trend, Innoviva Specialty Therapeutics’ Nuzolvence (zoliflodacin) and GSK’s Blujepa (gepotidacin) recently secured approval from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), putting an end to the more than three decade-long drought of novel antibiotics in this indication. At the time these drugs secured marketing authorisation, Fiona Chisholm, associate director of infectious diseases at GlobalData, noted that they represent “an exciting new era” for the gonorrhoea market, which she said has “long been characterised by a pressing unmet need for novel therapies.”
Meanwhile, some healthcare systems are endorsing the use of antibiotic doxycycline as a post-exposure prophylaxis (doxy-PEP), as taking this widely prescribed generic therapy within 72 hours after sex can reduce an individual’s risk of conducting a bacterial STI by between 51-89%, depending on the infection, according to the UK’s National Health Service (NHS).
While doxy-PEP has the potential to prevent STIs, the ECDC warns that widespread use of the drug for gonorrhoea prevention could further accelerate the development of resistant strains, so it does not currently recommend its widespread use.
As the threat of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) continues to rise, the World Health Organization (WHO) has called for drugmakers to prioritise the development of antibiotics for three priority pathogenic profiles. This includes severe multidrug-resistant (MDR) gram-negative infections, severe gram-positive infections in immunosuppressed and critically ill patients, and bacterial meningitis.
