Treatment of gonorrhoea contracted in the Western Pacific Region.

The treatment of acute gonorrhoea continues to be a subject of interest to the medical profession despite the long experience with the disease universally accumulated by physicians. Penicillin is generally accepted to be the drug of choice in its treatment, but other drugs are also effective (Brit. med. J., 1971; Neumann and Baecker, 1972). The evaluation of drug regimens for gonorrhoea is complicated by the ease of re-infection and the shortness of the incubation period. The confounding of treatnent failure with re-infection is resolved in military populations isolated by deployment at sea. procaine penicillin G supplemented with probenecid experienced only a 2 per cent. failure rate; these observations were confirmed by additional shipboard studies in the same and subsequent year (Holmes and others, 1968). Patients contracting gonorrhoea in 1968 and 1969 in the same geographical area and treated with the same drug regimen (Keys, Halverson, and Clarke, 1969) also demonstrated a failure rate of 2 per cent. A failure rate of 7-6 per cent. with this regimen was reported by Maurer and Schneider (1969) in patients contracting the disease in Vietnam; however, these patients were not isolated by deployment at sea. Our experience with the treatment of gonorrhoea contracted during 1971 by men embarked upon an aircraft carrier operating in the Gulf of Tonkin is reported in this paper.