Little-known sexually transmitted disease Mycoplasma genitalium, which can leave some women infertile, is on its way to becoming a superbug.
Mycoplasma genitalium is developing a resistance to antibiotics and can be missed if not diagnosed correctly, the BBC News reported. The STD has no symptoms and can cause pelvic inflammatory disease, leading to infertility.
A U.S. study noted that 1.0 percent of sexually active adolescents may have Mycoplasma genitalium, making it the third most common STD among young people in the country behind chlamydia (4.2 percent) and trichomoniasis (2.3 percent), the website Mycoplasma Cure.com reported.
Dr. Olwen Williams, president of the British Association for Sexual Health and HIV, charged on social media that enough is not being done to corral the disease.
Mycoplasma genitalium, or MG, was first identified in the United Kingdom in the 1980s and is believed to affect one to two percent of the general population, according to the BBC News. It can be contracted by having unprotected sex with someone who has the disease.
In 2015, Britain's National Health Service said a large study there found that one in 100 adults ages 16 to 44 had the disease, with most showing no symptoms. The study said then that black men and men from "deprived" areas were more likely to carry the disease.
Experts told CNN that MG is now starting to become more resistant to antibiotics and could become a superbug within five years, while preventing as many as 4,800 women to become pregnant each year.
"MG is rapidly becoming the new 'superbug,'" Dr. Peter Greenhouse, the lead sexual health clinician at Weston General Hospital's Weston Integrated Sexual Health Centre, told CNN. "It's already increasingly resistant to most of the antibiotics we use to treat chlamydia and changes its pattern of resistance during treatment, so it's like trying to hit a moving target."
CNN said new guidelines for the treatment of MG were published this week, a few months after the first case of a super-resistant gonorrhea had been reported in U.K.
"The new guidelines will be helpful, but unless and until we get funds so we can regularly test for it, we'll be in the dark about which women with pelvic inflammatory disease have got it and about what their true risk of long term complications are," Greenhouse told CNN.
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