Since the 1980s, more than 60,000 patients have reported hundreds of thousands of serious events linked to fluoroquinolones to the FDA, including 6,575 reports of deaths -- yet many doctors continue to overprescribe them.
But FDA regulators have stopped short of barring fluoroquinolone use in the treatment of bacterial infections, citing the benefits for certain conditions.
Rachel Brummert, a patient advocate who sits on an FDA consumer advisory board, believes the FDA needs to improve its communication to doctors on fluoroquinolone risks and get tougher with those who continue to inappropriately prescribe the drugs. Brummert says such a system might have prevented the harm from taking Levaquin her doctor prescribed for a suspected sinus infection in 2006.
“It seems common sense to me now that you don’t prescribe something that can kill anthrax for a simple sinus infection. It’s like an atom bomb killing a mosquito. I agree that there are uses for these drugs, but they are being overprescribed. And so, here I am 16 years later – I’m still rupturing, I’m still having surgery, and I’m still in pain – all for something I didn’t even need medicine for in the first place.
“You can’t separate this from the fact that 80% of antibiotic prescriptions in the outpatient setting are probably illegitimate or not warranted,” he notes. “And because fluoroquinolones are highly effective drugs against certain pathogens, they are the go-to [drug] for many people who are prescribing antibiotics.”
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