An Alaska woman has died after a rare and severe complication of gonorrhea, health officials report.
The unnamed woman, who was in her 50s, died this spring from disseminated gonococcal infection (DGI), which occurs when the sexually transmitted infection gonorrhea invades the bloodstream and travels to vital organs.
According to the Alaska Department of Health, the woman arrived at her local emergency department in Anchorage in heart failure and septic shock, the body’s extreme overreaction to an infection.
She had contracted gonorrhea, which affects 700,000 Americans a year, at some point within the previous six months.
It’s unclear if she had any other health issues other than opioid addiction and if she contracted gonorrhea from a long-term partner.
The diagnosis of DGI only came after her death because she declined so quickly. Her cause of death was primarily due to the sepsis and heart failure.
The woman’s death comes as Alaska records the second-highest rate of STIs in the country, only falling behind Mississippi. Experts believe this is due to weak public health infrastructure and high rates of substance abuse, among other factors.
The latest data shows 25 people per 100,000 Alaska residents have gonorrhea, and cases of syphilis have surged 20-fold since 2016.
An anonymous woman in Alaska died from a rare complication of gonorrhea that caused her to go into organ failure (stock image)
The woman in the report was one of eight Alaskans to be identified with DGI between January and May of this year, the health department said in a bulletin.
They ranged in age from 32 to 59, and five of them were women. The average age was 40. There were no other recorded deaths from DGI.
None of the patients in the report are thought to be connected to one another.
The woman who died had been treated twice in the prior six months for opioid addiction, but there was no record of gonorrhea testing.
Gonorrhea is an STI caused by the bacteria Neisseria gonorrhoeae, which spreads through bodily fluids like semen and vaginal fluids.
It can move from person to person through oral sex, intercourse or sharing sex toys with an infected person.
Most people with gonorrhea are between ages 15 and 24 and don’t have symptoms, though the infection can cause unusual genital discharge, pain during sex, pain during urination, lower abdominal pain, itching, testicular pain in men and bleeding in between periods for women.
In DGI, gonorrhea infections travel to the bloodstream and infect organs throughout the body due to the infection going untreated.
DGI is thought to occur in just 0.5 percent of all gonorrhea cases.
Health officials writing the Alaska report said risk factors for DGI, based on the women’s medical records, were methamphetamine and opioid use, alcoholism, injected drug use, homelessness and having multiple sexual partners within a year.
Cases of STIs in the US have spiked 90 percent in the last 20 years, but a recent slowdown has been observed.
In a 2024 CDC report, reported cases of gonorrhea fell for a second year, declining seven percent from 2022 to below pre-pandemic levels.
Alaska’s health department recommends adults be tested for gonorrhea if they have at least one of the following risk factors: being under 25 years old, having a new partner, having more than one partner, previous STIs, a history of prostitution or a history of being incarcerated.
And people who are sexually active and have a new partner, history of drug use or past STI should be tested every three to six months.
