Abstract
Gonorrhea, a disease recognized for centuries, has become an important social disease of the world today» Soon after chemotherapeutic treatment began, Dees and Colston (17) introduced the sulfonamides to treat gonorrhea, but strains which were resistant to sulfa drugs rapidly appeared. After penicillin was introduced and used routinely for treatment, the incidence of gonorrhea and syphilis declined rapidly. This led to complacency and a reduction in facilities for the control of venereal disease. Since the late 1950‘s there has been a rapid increase in the venereal disease rate, especially among teenagers, and recently the disease has reached epidemic proportions both in the United States and in the rest of the world. | In the human male, Neisseria gonorrhoeae causes an acute anterior urethritis with a purulent discharge. In the female, the infection is usually asymptomatic with few signs of disease, and the cervix is the most frequently infected site. In both sexes, infection may spread to other areas of the urogenital system or crypts of the rectum. Other manifestations of gonococcal infection may present themselves in the joints and conjunctiva. Specimens from these involved sites are sent to the laboratory for examination. The usual procedure is to perform a gram stain (from clinical material and culture plate), culture the specimen on enriched media (35-35 C in 3-10% CO2), and do the oxidase test, carbohydrate fermentations and fluorescent antibody studies. N. gonorrhoeae is a gram-negative diplococcus with adjacent sides flattened or slightly concave. It is 0.6 to 1.0 p. in diameter, nonmotile, nonsporulating and noncapsulated except in a mucoid variant phase (1).