Gonorrhea remains one of the more common sexually transmitted infections. In North America, the number of reported cases has generally risen for over ten years, with interruptions in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, followed by returns to rising rates of infection. Under the selective pressure of antimicrobial treatment, antimicrobial resistance has risen, which has led to limited options for treatment

Today, we will be discussing antimicrobial resistance in N. gonorrhoeae, including these questions:
    •    How accurate is gradient diffusion susceptibility testing when compared to agar-dilution results?
    •    Should we use analysis of whole genome sequencing results or agar dilution phenotypic results as the gold-standard for antibiotic susceptibility testing of N. gonorrhoeae?
    •    What is the utility of beta-lactamase testing for predicting penicillin susceptibility results in N. gonorrhoeae?

Guests:

• Dr. Tanis Dingle, Clinical Microbiologist at Alberta Precision Laboratories and a Clinical Associate Professor in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the University of Calgary.
• Dr. Angela Ma., Clinical Microbiologist at Public Health Ontario.

Link:

• Use of genome sequencing to resolve differences in gradient diffusion and agar dilution antimicrobial susceptibility testing performance of Neisseria gonorrhoeae isolates in Alberta, Canada

This episode of Editors in Conversation is brought to you by the Journal of Clinical Microbiology and hosted by JCM Editor in Chief, Alex McAdam and Dr. Elli Theel. JCM is available at https://jcm.asm.org and on https://twitter.com/JClinMicro.

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