The incidence of gonorrhoea in England rose steeply between 1998 and 1999, according to initial figures released last month by the Public Health Laboratory Service (PHLS). Reported diagnoses of the disease increased by 26% in men and by 30% in women, although a much bigger increase occurred in the group aged 16-19 years, which showed a rise of 52% in young men and 39% in young women. The rise in the incidence of disease occurred in all regions of England, with the exception of the south east, where an 8% drop in cases of gonorrhoea among women was recorded.

The PHLS collects data on sexually transmitted infection from genitourinary medicine clinics throughout England. The incidence of gonorrhoea has been rising since 1994, but the preliminary figures for last year show the biggest increase for five years. The final number for reported cases of gonorrhoea will not be collected until later on this year, but numbers collected from genitourinary clinics so far have been analysed to give a statistical model of disease incidence. The largest previous rise in cases of gonorrhoea since 1994 was 19% in men and 33% in women, between 1995 and 1996.

Dr Mike Catchpole from the PHLS Communicable Disease Surveillance Centre, said that areas of weakness in health care identified by the figure included testing, awareness of resistance to antibiotics, and health promotion. "We now have a whole new generation of people who were not exposed to the HIV awareness campaigns of the 1980s and early 1990s, and it is vital that they understand the general principles of sexual health and safer sex," he commented. "These new data suggest that levels of unsafe sex are increasing. This is of particular concern as it clearly has implications for the transmission of other sexually transmitted infections and, of course, HIV."