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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: studdog who wrote (6396)	10/20/2001 9:50:57 AM
From: Ilaine	Respond to of 281500

You are right that all medications have side effects. OTOH, I do have a PDR and Cipro does have more side effects listed than, say, doxycycline. Cipro is an important advance in antibiotic therapy because there are few bacteria which are resistant to it, so it's great for treating drug-resistant strains of bacteria. Cipro is effective against more types of bacteria than doxycycline. OTOH, doxycycline is so well-tolerated that it's used for long-term antibiotic therapy, in the sense of months or even years. I have rheumatoid arthritis and used minocycline, a cousin of doxycycline, for a couple of years as a DMARD without noticeable side effects. Doxycycline is given to people with bad acne for months, even years. I think the reason they are using Cipro as prophylactic therapy for people who have been exposed to anthrax spores is that it is the only drug approved by the FDA for inhalation anthrax, although doxycycline and penicillin are as effective in the lab. Nobody really knows whether inhalation anthrax can be prevented by the use of antibiotics but that is the hope, because it's fatal at least 80% of the time, maybe 95%. We just don't know because this never happened before.