Pelvic infection tied to bacterial gene
By John Travis
From Los Angeles, at the annual meeting of the American Society for Microbiology
When it infects the cervix or urethra, Neisseria gonorrhoeae, the bacterium behind gonorrhea, fails to produce symptoms in many women. That’s not necessarily good. Women with such silent infections never get treatment, permitting N. gonorrhoeae to spread to the fallopian tubes and elsewhere in the upper genital tract. There the bacteria cause pelvic inflammatory disease (PID), a condition that strikes an estimated 1 million U.S. women every year and leaves 10 percent of them infertile.