Treatment failure with the use of ciprofloxacin for gonorrhea correlates with the prevalence of fluoroquinolone-resistant Neisseria gonorrhoeae strains in Bangladesh.
Although ciprofloxacin is one of the recommended drugs of choice for the treatment of gonorrhea, in vitro resistance to this drug has been observed in surveillance studies and case reports from many parts of the world, including Bangladesh. However, to our knowledge, there have been no prospective studies of the correlation between in vitro response to the drug and treatment outcome. Therefore, a prospective study of 217 female sex workers in Dhaka, Bangladesh, was conducted to examine the correlation between the in vitro response of Neisseria gonorrhoeae and the outcome of ciprofloxacin treatment. Overall, 37.8% of the gonococcal isolates recovered from female sex workers were resistant to ciprofloxacin, and there was a good correlation between in vitro resistance and treatment failure. These findings suggest that in vitro resistance to ciprofloxacin is predictive of clinical treatment failure in patients with gonorrhea.