Spain Preceded the UK's Gonorrhoea Vaccination Program

While the media recently highlighted the United Kingdom's gonorrhoea vaccination initiative, it appears that Galicia, Spain, was actually the first jurisdiction in the world to implement a program to prevent gonorrhoea through vaccination.

According to a recent article published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases, the Galician program launched on June 2, 2025, targeting adults aged 18–65 years at high risk of sexually transmitted infections, including those with recent diagnoses of gonorrhoea, chlamydia, syphilis, mpox, or HIV; individuals with repeated use of pre-exposure or post-exposure prophylaxis; and those engaged in high-risk sexual behaviours.

Galicia is located in Spain's northwest, along the Atlantic Ocean coastline.

Unlike the UK programme, which targets only men who have sex with men with recent bacterial sexually transmitted infection or those with five or more sexual partners in the past 3 months, the Galician programme includes all genders and broader risk criteria, thus also providing access to women and heterosexual populations.

Galicia employs a decentralised, opportunistic delivery strategy through primary care and preventive medicine services, in contrast to the UK, which relies on specialised services (i.e., sexual health clinics) only.

The Galician structure broadens access and facilitates earlier intervention in diverse populations, including asymptomatic women who are often underdiagnosed.

In Europe and the UK, the Bexsero (MenB-4C) vaccine was authorized based on this indication, demonstrating an immune response as measured by serum bactericidal activity against three serogroup B strains representative of prevalent strains in the region.

In the United States, over 1 million new N. Gonorrhea infections occur each year, and gonorrhea is the second most commonly reported bacterial sexually transmitted disease, according to the U.S. CDC. However, preventive vaccination is not currently endorsed in the U.S.