Demographic and Epidemiological Characteristics Associated With Reduced Antimicrobial Susceptibility to Neisseria gonorrhoeae in the United States, Strengthening the US Response to Resistant Gonorrhea, 2018 to 2019

Background Jurisdictions participating in Strengthening the US Response to Resistant Gonorrhea (SURRG) implemented specimen collection for culture and antimicrobial susceptibility testing from a sample of persons of all genders (at multiple anatomic sites) attending sexually transmitted disease clinics and community clinics. We describe the percentage and characteristics of patients whose isolates demonstrated reduced susceptibility (RS) to azithromycin, ceftriaxone, or cefixime. Methods We included patients from clinics that participated in SURRG whose isolates underwent antimicrobial susceptibility testing by Etest. We defined RS as azithromycin minimum inhibitory concentrations (MICs) >= 2 mu g/mL (AZM-RS), ceftriaxone MICs >= 0.125 mu g/mL (CRO-RS), or cefixime MICs >= 0.25 mu g/mL (CFX-RS). Patients with repeated infections appeared >1 time in the data. We calculated the frequency and percentage of patients with an isolate demonstrating RS by epidemiological characteristics. Results During the period 2018-2019, 10,013 patients from 8 jurisdictions provided 10,735 isolates. Among 10,013 patients, 11.0% (n = 1099) had >= 1 isolate with AZM-RS (range by jurisdiction, 2.5%-18.0%). Approximately 11.3% of 8771 of patients visiting sexually transmitted disease clinics and approximately 8.8% of 1242 patients visiting community clinics had an AZM-RS isolate. Nearly 6% of 1013 females had an AZM-RS isolate; among males, the percents of patients with an AZM-RS isolate were 17.7% among 4177 men who have sex only with men and 6.1% among 3581 men who have sex only with women. Few (0.4%) patients had isolates with CFX-RS (n = 40) or CRO-RS (n = 43). Conclusions Although infections with reduced cephalosporin susceptibility were rare, AZM-RS infections were prevalent in this sample of patients in multiple jurisdictions and across gender and gender of sex partner categories.