U.S. health officials plan to endorse a common antibiotic as a morning-after pill that gay and bisexual men can use to try to avoid some increasingly common sexually transmitted diseases.
The proposed CDC guideline was released Monday, and officials will move to finalize it after a 45-day public comment period. With STD rates rising to record levels, “more tools are desperately needed,” said Dr. Jonathan Mermin of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The proposal comes after studies found some people who took the antibiotic doxycycline within three days of unprotected sex were far less likely to get chlamydia, syphilis or gonorrhea compared with people who did not take the pills after sex.
So, as a pharmacist, I can tell you that Tetracyclines (class of drug which includes Doxy, Minocycline, Tetracycline) have been used as prophylactic drugs for quite a long time, and not just for their anti-microbial activity.
Minocycline for example is used prophylactically for recurrent UTIs, suspected meningitis, and frequent SSSI by staph
Doxycycline has been used long term for Acne prevention, Malaria prophylaxis, and STI treatment and prophylaxis.
While I do worry about overuse of Antibiotics in general. It seems that tetracyclines as a class have been used quite frequently over the last 50+ years. I am sure that in small pockets of the LGBT+ populations (the scope of this indication, it seems) you may see some resistance that will need to be treated with other antibiotics, but I don’t think that we will see much cross-over into the general public. Furthermore, it looks like their is a new class making its way to hospitals soon that can get around the resistance seen, but we will need more studies to further nail that down.