Number of Cipro Tendon Rupture Victims—Anyone’s Guess?
June 30th, 2009. By janem
It is estimated that one in every ten people will take a fluoroquinolone antibiotic during the course of their lifetime, and chances are it would either be Cipro or Levaquin, the two big blockbuster drugs. Take this statistic, add the fact that the FDA says less than 10 percent of all drug side effects ever get reported to their agency, and throw in the equation that many US troops were given Cipro, chances are countless people have suffered tendon tears and ruptures from these drugs. And according to Cipro patients writing online, Cipro’s adverse events are not as rare as the drug manufacturer—Bayer—would have the public believe.
And let’s not forget the Anthrax scare in 2001—if you recall, the antidote to have on hand and the drug that became the media darling during that scare was none other than Cipro. It was in such demand that Bayer had agreed to sell 100 million tablets of Cipro to the government for a mere 95 cents each. (Since that time, three other pharmaceutical companies offered their antibiotic drugs to the FDA for free if they could be approved for the treatment of Anthrax.) Obviously, Cipro is a big money maker for Bayer.
As of last January, the FDA reported at least 336 individuals had experienced a tendon rupture after using Cipro, Levaquin or one of the fluoroquinolone antibiotics—maybe the tip of the iceberg.
Bayer, meanwhile, argues that Cipro is safe. The gigantic pharma company says that more than 100 million Cipro prescriptions were written in the U.S. between 1989 and 1999, and the drug has been prescribed for more than 340 million patients worldwide but only 100 cases of tendon ruptures were reported in medical journals. But at that time, the incidence of tendon ruptures in Cipro patients taking a 60-day dosage had not yet been studied. And how many people would associate tendon ruptures with an antibiotic anyway?
