Gonorrhea: Not Yet Controllable

Excerpt

By any standards, gonorrhea is out of control in the United States, the estimated incidence having climbed to the neighborhood of 1,700,000 cases per year. One searches in vain for an easy answer to the question: Why?

Reasons frequently cited include increasing sexual promiscuity based on use of "the pill," and increasing resistance of Neisseria gonorrhoeae to antibiotics, usually related to resistant strains brought back by servicemen returning from Southeast Asia. But we have no indisputable evidence that there is any correlation between the incidence of gonorrhea and any actual or apparent change in our social-sexual behavior. If promiscuity were