Modeling the impact of treatment failure on chlamydia transmission and screening

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Standard current treatment regimens for chlamydia treatment have been widely considered to be highly effective, with a cure rate of around 97%. However, recent studies indicate that treatment failure may occur at a rate that is substantially higher than previously thought. METHODS: We use a mathematical dynamic transmission model to estimate the population-level impact of treatment failure on chlamydia transmission and on the effectiveness of screening strategies. RESULTS: The findings indicate that in high-resource settings such as Australia, there will be an approximately 0.16% linear increase in population prevalence for each incremental increase of 1% in the treatment failure..