Abstract

While the incidence of gonorrhoea in the Nordic countries (the Scandinavian countries of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, plus Finland and Iceland) continued to decrease in the early 1990s, the opposite was seen in neighbouring countries in the Barents and Baltic sea region. In the late 1990s the incidence of gonorrhoea increased in all of the Nordic countries. Concern was raised that this increase could be linked to the growing number of cases in the neighbouring regions, due either to people visiting these regions, or to sex workers operating in the Nordic countries. Thorough surveillance in the Nordic countries reveals that probably only a small part of this increase is related to transmission across national borders.