Drug of the day. But other cheaper drugs can treat anthrax, too.
Everyone loves Cipro. Following the deadly bioterrorist attacks on the floor of the United States, many people are suspected of hoarding or even sinking, and supplies in pharmacies are short. As NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw - himself the target of one of the mail attacks - said: "In Cipro we trust" But some scientists warn that obsession is unjustified and can turn
..the Cipro popularity began just before the Gulf war, said CJ Peters, former deputy commander of the Institute of the US Army Medical Research of infectious diseases (USAMRIID) in Fort Detrick, Maryland. the US fears Iraq could free coal, and vaccines were in short supply Peters. - now at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. - and other experts feared that Iraq had developed strains resistant to existing antibiotics So the group focused on a relatively new drug, ciprofloxacin, Bayer, reasoning that Iraq would not understand how to evade. a quick experiment to USAMRIID has shown that the drug worked well in monkeys.
During the war, Bayer provided the government of the United States with 30 million Cipro tablets. In 1998, it appeared that the drug of choice in Management of Biological Casualties Handbook Medical Army, and a year later, a group of experts, writing in The Journal of the American Medical Association , concluded that Cyprus was the drug of choice to treat the unknown strains of coal, because there have been no published reports of resistance. In August 00, the FDA added to the list Cipro antibiotic approved for use in victims of inhalation anthrax.
But Cipro is not better than other antibiotics, such as penicillin and a class of antibiotics called tetracyclines, Peters said; the board he was 10 - its novelty - is gone. Worse, a dependence Cipro bioterrorist could try to produce Cipro-resistant strains of Bacillus anthracis .
In fact, microbiologist Paul Keim of Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff and his colleagues have done just that. Their goal was to find the key mutations that could help scientists quickly detect other Cipro-resistant strains in the future. To minimize the risk, the team used a weakened anthrax strain, but Keim said that the production of a fully virulent strain seems feasible for microbiologists who know the literature. Keim's team will not add to the literature, at least for now. "We have a ready to go paper," said Keim, "but I think I'll sit on it."
Related Sites
information FDA on Cipro
Bayer press release about the information Cipro
CDC about anthrax and current bioterrorist attacks
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