Gonorrhea

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hundred thousand cases annually. There is concern that due to the low rate of reporting cases of gonorrhea, almost the same number (300,000 cases) goes unreported annually. In men Neisseria gonorrhoeae; the etiologic agent of gonorrheal infections have been incriminated in urethritis while in women cervicitis; which can progress to pelvic inflammatory disease(PID), ectopic pregnancy, infertility and pelvic pain. Invasive infections include disseminated gonococcal infections(DGI), meningitidis and endocarditis. The latter two are considerably uncommon but they can result in serious morbidity.

Epidemiologically, overall rates of infections have plummeted since the mid-1970s to a rate of approximately 116.2 cases per 100, 000 cases by the end of 2003. Despite these statistical representations of overall decline in gonorrheal cases, racial disparities still persist and antibiotic resistance has been on the increase. The reasons behind this disparity in reduction is attributable to ...

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in the nasopharyngeal mucous membranes.

Structurally, Neisseria gonorrhoeae are unencapsulated, non motile, pilated organisms that have a pair of kidney beans like appearance. These pili are hair like surface appendages made of helical aggregates of subunit peptide repeats referred to as Palin. These structures are used by the organism to attach onto mucosal and epithelial cell surfaces as well as to confer resistance to phagocytic action. The pili acts as an important virulence factor. Pili are also antigenic. The existence of at least twenty gonococcal genes that code for pili confer the bacteria with the ability to synthesize and express multiple pili at different times. ...

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