Resistance-guided therapy is used in sexual health clinics to test what people are resistant to in order to give more effective treatment, but Ong said the research touched on longer term concerns that antibiotics will only be useful for so long. “Our standard treatment now is already two weeks of antibiotics and then if they are resistant, then they get an extra two weeks, and then if they are resistant to that, there’s another lot of antibiotics. Some identify as bisexual, while others use pansexual, queer, fluid, or no label at all to describe it. When this happens, it is called adult gender dysphoria. While it can start in childhood, gender dysphoria may not be experienced until after puberty or much later. When people presenting to the clinic have a resistance to antibiotics, they are prescribed multiple rounds of antibiotic treatments, Ong said. Bisexuality is a sexual orientation where somebody is attracted to more than one gender. Gender dysphoria occurs when a transgender person experiences psychological distress because of the mismatch between their assigned sex and their gender identity. “It is very difficult to treat this bug,” he said. Ong said that 15 years ago, MG resistance to antibiotics was around 10-20% among patients at the Melbourne Sexual Health Clinic, but now it was closer to 80-90%. “We are not just seeing this in our modelling work, but in real life.” “It might reduce the prevalence a little bit and control the burden of disease in the community, but actually it makes things worse because the end product of a lot of screenings is we will build a lot of resistance,” the sexual health physician Associate Prof Jason Ong, the lead author of the study, told Guardian Australia. The researchers discovered that while endemic MG prevalence could go down from its current level of 9.1% to 6.4% if all men who have sex with men were offered screenings, it would lead to a high proportion of antibiotic-resistant MG. In a research paper, published in March in journal EClinical Medicine, researchers built a mathematical model of MG transmission based on screening strategies and the prevalences of MG among men who have sex with men attending the Melbourne Sexual Health Clinic.