Antibiotic-resistant 'sexually transmitted diarrhoea' bug is surging in the UK and US as standard medicines fail

From the Newshound archive · first published 10 October 2026 · last updated 11 October 2026.

Cases of shigella — a gut infection spread through sex as well as contaminated food — have exploded across Britain and the US, with UK health authorities recording a sharp rise in 2025 and over 2,560 sexual transmissions in the past year alone. Professor Kate Baker of Cambridge warned that sexual transmission is now 'a sustained part' of shigella's spread. Cases of C. diff, a separate faecal-route stomach bug, have simultaneously surged more than 50 per cent across England since 2020, hitting around 19,000 a year.

The North West now has the highest C. diff infection rate in England at 46.5 cases per 100,000 — up 64 per cent in five years.

Shigella is becoming UNTREATABLE: by 2023, 8.5% of US samples were showing resistance to all five antibiotics covered by the CDC's definition, compared with none before 2015.

A Los Angeles hospital now sees roughly one XDR shigella case a month — a stark change from 2022, when just a single case was recorded across the whole year.