POISONOUS PRESCRIPTIONS - Do Antibiotics Cause Asthma and Diabetes?
Poisonous Prescriptions was warning the public of the risk of antibiotics causing asthma back in 1994.
It is only more recently, with the emergence of MRSA that the medical profession, politicians and the public are beginning to 'wake up'.
Described in 1994 as being 'ahead of its time' (Environmental Health Officer, Australia), the latest edition of Poisonous Prescriptions
was featured in WDDTY (What Doctors Don't Tell You, August 2006, UK).
'I wish I had read it eight years ago', Mrs W, UK. Mother whose eldest child was seven years old.
Written for the public and medical profession and showing actual medical records, this book will make you think twice before taking
another drug. In the meantime, watch Sarah's Story in the VIDEO section of this website. Similar side-effects are not 'rare' events.
Children have been known to develop external and internal ulcers from their mouth to their anus from taking antibiotics.
Please tell your friends about this site, especially if they have children. Children have no voice, it is our responsibility to be informed
before feeding them potent chemicals.
Sick Kids Might Do Best Without Drugs By Katherine Leitzell Posted 7/12/07 Antibiotics have been called wonder drugs, and that they are—sometimes. Increasingly, however, researchers focused on children's health are identifying conditions in which the drugs seem to be useless, or worse. One recent study, for example, suggests that preventive use of antibiotics doesn't help kids who've previously had urinary tract infections. Another indicates that use of antibiotics for any purpose may increase kids' risk of developing asthma.
Only a small percentage of children develop UTIs. But about a third of those who do have a condition in which urine flows backward into the bladder, which puts them at high risk of getting reinfected. For those kids, doctors often prescribe daily antibiotic therapy in hopes of preventing a recurrence.
This daily preventive treatment isn't effective, according to a study published Wednesday in JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association. Moreover, children who developed a recurrent UTI during the study were more than seven times as likely, if they had received daily antibiotics, to have a drug-resistant infection rather than one that could be treated with common antibiotics.
"The more antibiotics a child is exposed to, the more likely [he or she is] to develop a resistant infection," says Patrick Conway, a pediatrician now at Cincinnati Children's Hospital and leader of the study. He and other doctors say that an increase in resistant bacteria is leading to more serious infections and hospitalizations from what used to be easily treated ailments, especially in children.
It's hard to keep the big picture in mind when a child is sick, concedes Conway. However, he says, parents and doctors should carefully weigh the risks and benefits of antibiotic treatment before administering the drugs. In children, antibiotics can cause side effects like diarrhea and skin rashes.
In a separate study, Anita Kozyrskyj of the University of Manitoba in Canada and her colleagues found that children who had received multiple courses of antibiotics in the first year of life faced an increased risk of developing asthma later on. Kids who got four or more courses of antibiotics increased their risk by 1 1/2 times, the researchers reported in the June issue of the journal Chest.
One explanation for this finding, according to Kozyrskyj, is that exposure early in life to a variety of germs helps the immune system develop normally. Indiscriminate antibiotic treatment could interfere with that development. "This hypothesis basically says that the world has become too clean," says Kozyrskyj. "If you're exposed to germs in early life, you're less likely to develop allergic diseases such as asthma." (The idea is supported by another of the study's findings: Infants exposed to dogs, which presumably bring babies into contact with a host of unfamiliar germs, have low rates of asthma.)
Pediatricians don't suggest abandoning antibiotic treatment entirely, but many now recommend a period of "watchful waiting" before treating illnesses like ear infections with antibiotics. Conway points out that a large proportion of childhood illnesses are caused by viruses, which are immune to antibiotics and, in any case, usually clear up on their own within a few days.
There is a man living in Springfield, MIssouri who developed diabetes because he took a commonly prescribed antibiotic, according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday. The complaint against Bristol-Myers Squibb and Schering Corporation claims its antibiotic drug Tequin and its generic equivalent gatifloxacin may have significantly increased a patient's risk of developing diabetes or another blood-sugar disorder.
The lawsuit seeks compensatory and punitive damages for Patrick Bills, who developed severe hyperglycemia and new onset diabetes while taking Tequin for a skin infection. The drug was also commonly prescribed for sinus, lung, and urinary tract infections, as well as other illnesses.
According to the complaint, filed in the U.S. Southern District Court in New York, the pharmaceutical company ignored mounting reports of diabetes-related problems until February 2006 when -- in conjunction with the FDA -- it added a warning to the label that diabetics should not take Tequin. However, the newly added warning label did not include any danger to non-diabetic patients, which the plaintiff was.
Safety concerns regarding Tequin began to surface in 2001, two years after the drug was approved by the Food and Drug Administration. A Canadian study cited in the March 2006 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine found that Tequin users had 17 times greater risk of developing serious diabetes and four times greater risk of being hospitalized with low blood sugar complications than patients using other antibiotics.
On May 2, 2006, Bristol-Myers Squibb quietly announced to its shareholders that it would stop making and selling Tequin; however, drugs that were already in pharmacies and in doctor's offices throughout the country were still being prescribed and without adequate warning, the complaint states. On May 9, 2006, a class-action lawsuit was filed in Canada against Bristol-Myers Squibb, the makers of Tequin, alleging that it failed to warn patients about the risks associated with the drug.
THE TOLL
American diabetes rates jumped by one-third in the 1990s. The blood-sugar disease—a leading cause of blindness, kidney failure, limb amputations, and heart attacks—increased 40 percent among fortysomethings and 70 percent among thirtysomethings. It kills about 180,000 people a year.
Physicians' spin: In the same time period, the number of overweight Americans rose from one in eight to one in five. That's no coincidence. Diet and exercise, people! (www.slate.com)
Author's note: Although penicillin was discovered in the UK by the late Sir Alexander Fleming (who incidently was born and lived down the road from where this is being written!), the patent was American. Due to problems of 'scaling up' for commercial production, a British scientist collaborated with an American scientist on American soil. By the time the British scientist returned to England, the Americans had already filed for a patent. Within years, tons of penicillin had been consumed by the American public.
