Antibiotics and many drugs are easy to purchase across the counter and also easy to abuse. However, laboratory scientists say this is a major cause of the resistance being mounted by the bacteria causing gonorrhea. Researchers in the UK say it’s becoming harder to find antibiotics that treat the infection because the bacteria causing the disease are now resistant to many forms of treatment. They predict the disease could be untreatable by 2015 as a result of the resistance. Principal Biomedical Scientist at MDS Lancet Rev. Kennedy Bentum confirmed this to Joy News and said government must lead in researching into better ways of dealing with the infection. “Government must be able to facilitate research in our environment so that scientists will begin to find out how best we can all solve this problem. But the point is that education is so necessary,” he indicated. “People should stop just going to the pharmacy shops and just narrating their situation to the pharmacists and take drugs. You should be able to go to the hospital to see a medical doctor, go to the medical laboratory facility to really let them know the exact cause of the sickness. “There are lots of drugs that are being administered to people and they’re not working and that’s the reason why we keep going to different generations of drugs – first to fourth generations. And as the generation goes higher the drug becomes expensive. So doctors will like to prescribe second generation drugs. But when it’s not working they prescribe third generation drugs.” He believes it’s time to educate Ghanaians about the resistance to certain drugs and the need to refrain from abusing drugs. Bacterial Mutation The BBC quoted Professor Cathy Ison, head of the National Reference Laboratory for Gonorrhoea which is part of Public Health England, as saying: "Hopefully by raising awareness we can at least buy some time and look at new ways in which we can prevent it from becoming untreatable." "But there is a possibility that if we don't do something then it could become untreatable by 2015." This is as result of bacterial mutation. A mutation is a permanent change in the DNA sequence of a gene. Mutations in a gene's DNA sequence can alter the amino acid sequence of the protein encoded by the gene. This capability of the bacteria is responsible for its resistance to antibiotics of various generations. “Once you export [bacteria] to certain environments, they try to go through mutation and then be able to resist so at a point you give medication and they are resistant to it,” Biomedical Scientist Rev. Kennedy Bentum said.