Alaskan Woman's Death From Gonorrhea Sparks Fears of a New Strain

Gizmodo

03-07-2025

A well-known sexually transmitted infection might be causing more trouble than usual in Alaska. Local health officials this week have reported the death of a woman in her 50s from a rare complication of gonorrhea that's becoming increasingly more common in the state.
On Monday, the Alaska Department of Health detailed the tragic death in its latest epidemiology bulletin. The woman died from an untreated gonorrhea infection that had spread widely throughout her body. Health officials are worried that novel strains of the bacteria may be behind a spike of similar cases reported in the area over the past three years.
Gonorrhea is caused by the bacteria Neisseria gonorrhoeae, and it's one of the most commonly reported STIs worldwide. In 2023, there were over 600,000 documented cases of gonorrhea in the U.S. alone. Common symptoms include puke-colored genital discharge and bloody urination, as well as swollen testicles in men and bleeding between periods for women. One reason why gonorrhea is dangerous, however, is that it often doesn't cause symptoms at all. And when it goes unnoticed and untreated, it can potentially trigger infertility and raise the risk of catching other STIs. If it's passed down from mother to child in the womb, the infection can also cause severe complications like blindness in the newborn.
The Rise of Super Gonorrhea
Seldomly, the bacteria migrate away from where they normally infect us (the genitals and sometimes the throat) to other parts of the body. This complication is called a disseminated gonococcal infection, or DGI. DGIs can cause varying health problems, depending on where the bacteria end up, such as arthritis or skin lesions. On very rare occasions, the infection can turn lethal if it reaches vital areas like the heart or bloodstream.
In this particular case, the woman visited a local emergency room in Anchorage earlier this spring with symptoms of respiratory distress. She was diagnosed with septic shock and heart failure caused by endocarditis (an inflammation of the inner lining of our heart's valves and chambers). Tests confirmed the widespread presence of gonorrhea bacteria in her body and bloodstream. Soon after, she succumbed to her infection.
While DGI is rare, and deaths from it even rarer, something strange appears to be happening in Alaska as of late. Since 2023, there's been a marked increase in reported DGI cases. In 2024, there were 24 documented cases—three times higher than the tally reported in 2023 (eight cases) and ten times higher than 2022 (two cases). So far in 2025, there have been eight reported cases of DGI, still well above the typical average in Alaska and the U.S. as a whole.
In many of these cases, including the latest one, people experienced no or few symptoms of their gonorrhea prior to their DGI. They also often had no clear risk factors for an STI and sometimes even tested negative on standard urine and genital swab tests for gonorrhea. Though officials haven't identified a specific link or chain of transmission between these cases, they suspect that emerging strains of gonorrhea could be causing the local rise in DGI. These strains might be more likely to cause DGI in general, or they might be less likely to cause initial symptoms, allowing infections to go untreated at a higher rate than typical.
Though there are still many questions to be answered, health officials are warning residents to be especially proactive about their sexual health.
'People in the Anchorage area with a new sexual partner, more than one sexual partner, or a partner with multiple partners might be at risk of acquiring a strain of N. gonorrhoeae thought to carry a higher risk of causing DGI,' the health department stated in its bulletin. Officials are recommending that people with these risk factors get regularly tested for gonorrhea every three to six months.
Super Gonorrhea May Have Met Its Nemesis
This isn't the only recent new trick that gonorrhea has gotten up its sleeve. Other strains of the bacteria have increasingly evolved resistance to the last remaining frontline drugs available against it. These cases of super gonorrhea, while still rare, are spreading as well. Just last month, researchers reported the first such case discovered in Canada.