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Popular due to their effectiveness in fighting various bacterial infections, fluoroquinolone antibiotics carry risks that can be worse than the illness. SNIP>>>>>> Fluoroquinolones, including ciprofloxacin (Cipro), levofloxacin (Levaquin), and moxifloxacin (Avelox), are powerful antibiotics designed to battle various bacterial infections—from urinary tract and respiratory infections to dermatological conditions. Fluoroquinolones are broadly effective and can reach deep into tissues to combat bacteria, which made them increasingly popular among doctors after their U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval in 1980. They also require fewer doses than some other antibiotics, making them convenient for patients to use. Fluoroquinolones possess the ability to...

The ER is a complex and challenging environment where success is not always achieved, and where futility rears its ugly head far more frequently than we would wish. In such an environment, the quick successes can often have the effect of restoring confidence, especially after a long string of difficult cases where success has been elusive. The confidence factor is magnified when the case involves a scared patient with a heart that has decided to do its own thing. I arrived for the beginning of my shift and received report from the offgoing RN about a patient who had just...

Please pray for my health. I am suffering from the side effects of fluoroquinolones (includes Avelox, Cipro, and Levaquin) which has caused depression, anxiety, insomnia, and jitteryness. Luckily, I have found a doctor who has treated people for FQ toxicity but the treatment is slow in acting in my system and I am struggling through each day and find it hard to plan anything. Please pray for strength and healing for me and strength for my wife who has supported me morally and sometimes physically through this ordeal. Pray that the medicine is the right one for me and that...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Congressional Democrats on Wednesday introduced legislation that would repeal a law that gives vaccine, drug and medical device makers broad protection against lawsuits in a public health or bioterror emergency. Democrats generally agree there should be some legal protections for certain vaccines but say the Republican version defined health emergency too broadly and did not compensate people who were injured. The liability provision, strongly favored by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee, was added to a defense bill enacted in December. Democrats would have an uphill struggle trying to repeal it.

NEW YORK, Feb. 19 /PRNewswire/ -- A few weeks after 9/11, Newsweek has learned, Vice President Dick Cheney worried that he and his family and his staff might have been exposed in an anthrax attack. According to knowledgeable former officials, a mysterious letter turned up at the vice president's mansion. (A former senior law-enforcement official recalled that sensors went off.) The alarm turned out to be false. Still, to be safe, Cheney and his entourage began taking Cipro, the powerful antibiotic. The story was hushed up.

IT IS EXCEEDINGLY rare these days to find something that the House and the Senate, the Republicans and the Democrats, can all agree on. But after the Senate's final passage of the Project Bioshield bill last week -- by a vote of 99 to 0 -- it seems that there really is near-unanimous, bipartisan support for speeding up development and stockpiling of the vaccines, antidotes and diagnostic devices that could be used to deter or help cope with a biological terrorist attack in the United States. The bill, a version of which was passed by a comparable margin in the...

CDC Suggests Change in Treatment for Gay, Bisexual Men The number of gay and bisexual men who are getting infected with gonorrhea that cannot be cured by the most commonly used antibiotics is increasing rapidly, federal health officials said yesterday. Antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea more than doubled between 2002 and 2003, primarily because of a jump from a rate of 1.8 percent to 4.9 percent among gay and bisexual men, according to preliminary data collected at sexually transmitted disease clinics in 23 cities, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported. Massachusetts and New York City have reported similar findings. As...