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Abstract
[...]after persistent campaigning by patient groups, attitudes began to change in 2008, when the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced the first of what would be a series of strong alerts about the side effects of fluoroquinolone drugs, including tendon rupture and irreversible nerve damage. Fluoroquinolone toxicity, they say, provides a compelling example of an emerging understanding that antibiotics don't just harm microbes - they can severely damage human cells, too. [...]recently, investigations into the side effects of antibiotics have focused on how the drugs disrupt the human microbiome, says James Collins, a medical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. [...]in 2001, sales of cipro surged after a series of terrorist attacks involving anthrax; the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommended a 60-day course for anyone at risk ofbeing exposed. [...]mitochondrial damage isn't the only theory in play: a 2015 study, done on human kidney cells8, reported that fluoroquinolones can bind to iron atoms from the active sites of several enzymes that modify DNA, leading to epigenetic changes that might be related to some of the drugs' side effects. According to internal e-mails read out in court in 2009 as part of a Vioxx class-action case in Australia, a list e-mailed among Merck employees contained doctors' names with the labels "neutralize", "neutralized" or "discredit" next to them.