It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's SuperBug... NOT!!!

INNERSPACE—It made headlines last Thursday, but it's gone with the wind today—though apparently The Daily Beast hasn't discovered that yet. Yes, the "sex superbug" that "could be worse than AIDS" which was supposedly "found in Hawaii [and] California" turns out to be just another media-promoted terror story. "The [gonorrhea] super-strain designated H041 was found to have infected a female Japanese sex worker in 2011 and was resistant to 'last line of defense' antibiotics in the family of cephalosporins—such as the drugs cefixime and ceftriaxone," reported Jonathan Weiss of MedicalDaily.com. "This strain has been found nowhere else." The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have affirmed that the bacterium has failed to appear anywhere else in the world beyond the single case in Japan. But let's face it: It's been a while since the U.S. has had a good medical scare, Tommy Pistol's upcoming movie notwithstanding, and what with AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF) pushing its bogus figures regarding STD infections among adult performers as the basis for upholding the unconstitutional Measure B and passing the equally-flawed AB 332, it's nice to be able to inject a little sanity into the discussion. For instance, there's the statement from Peter Whiticir of the STD/AIDS Prevention Control branch of Hawaii's State Department of Health: "There is no multi-drug super resistant superbug yet in Hawaii or the United States. We don't have the superbug in Hawaii—that, I repeat again—but I think it does raise people's consciousness that gonorrhea is out there, there are new strains that are developing and evolving and we need to be aware of that and protect ourselves." Fortunately, adult performers are rapidly moving from a monthly to a biweekly testing regimen at APHSS-approved clinics and test sites, which so far have proven adept at catching the few infections with which they've been presented and preventing them from reaching the rest of the performer population. Even so, scaremonger William Smith, executive director of the National Coalition of STD, who called the single appearance of H041 "a very tricky bug" with a "potential for disaster," has asked members of Congress for $54 million to create new antibiotics to fight the non-lethal bacterium, which is undoubtedly a good idea... but it's no excuse to suppress adult sexual speech, as the current and pending laws are intended to do.