Adaptive Treatment Policies for Gonorrhea Control

The clinical and public health community are facing the challenge of increasing antibiotic resistance in gonorrhea. We are modifying an existing gonorrhea point-of-care testing model to investigate how different properties associated with a newly introduced antibiotic influence decision-making for gonorrhea treatment recommendations. The model will describe a range of properties associated with a novel antimicrobial, such as the probability of resistance emergence on treatment and an estimate of fitness cost associated with resistance.  Using near real-time observations, our adaptive decision-making framework defines treatment policies that are expected to prevent the most gonorrhea cases while requiring the fewest number of switches between available treatment recommendations.