Urgent warning…

Cases of terrifying ‘super-gonorrhoea’ in England have almost doubled in a single year, official data shows.

Health officials say there has been a rising prevalence of a strain of the sexually transmitted infection (STI) that doesn’t respond to antibiotics usually used to treat it.

Experts have warned this surge could render a once easily dealt with condition ‘untreatable’.

Left untreated, gonorrhoea can permanently render patients infertile or leave them with agonising long term inflammation in their pelvis.

And worryingly a significant portion of people may not even realise they have the STI, as they have no obvious symptoms.

Officials say most cases detected in England are linked patients who had travelled to the Asia-Pacific region, where the resistant strains are more common.

As such they have urged Britons to use condoms both while at home and abroad.

While transmission of the drug-resistant strain of the STI within England has been ‘limited’, experts say increasing case numbers are giving the disease more chances to spread locally.

Symptoms of gonorrhoea include green or yellow discharge from the vagina or penis, pain when urinating, as well as pain and discomfort in the rectum.

For women specifically, symptoms can include lower abdominal pain or bleeding between periods.

Data from The UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) shows 17 cases of gonorrhoea resistant to ceftriaxone, the front-line medication used to treat the STI, were detected in England between January 2024 and March 2025.

This compares to just 16 such cases for the entirety of 2022 and 2023.

Even more concerning are cases of what experts call ‘extensively drug resistant’ — or XDR gonorrhoea.

This strain of the infection is resistant to both ceftriaxone and as well as other medications, surviving and even thriving in patients despite treatment.

So far, 9 cases of XDR gonorrhoea have been recorded between January 2024 to March 2025.

This is almost double the five XDR cases in 2022 and 2023.