This week, I'll delve into the surprising history of antibiotics. You'll learn how penicillin was discovered by accident and how its development was helped along by a moldy cantaloupe from a Peoria, Illinois farmers market. I'll also uncover how it went on to act as a secret weapon, helping the allied forces to victory during World War II. Plus I'm going to get real personal to share the tell all story of why my husband is physically disabled and suffering from chronic pain at the age of 35 from taking a particular type of antibiotic. This is not easy to share, but I need to warn you. It may very well save your life.
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This week, I'll delve into the surprising history of antibiotics. You'll learn how penicillin was discovered by accident and how its development was helped along by a moldy cantaloupe from a Peoria, Illinois farmers market. I'll also uncover how it went on to act as a secret weapon, helping the allied forces to victory during World War II. Plus I'm going to get real personal to share the tell all story of why my husband is physically disabled and suffering from chronic pain at the age of 35 from taking a particular type of antibiotic. This is not easy to share, but I need to warn you. It may very well save your life.
Sources:
Support the show!
Say you have strep throat. It hurts, it sucks, but it’s no big deal really. You go to the doctor, they prescribe you an antibiotic, you take it, good to go in like 24 hours. But what if I told you strep throat, now easily curable with antibiotics, may have been a death sentence less than 100 years ago? Before the discovery of antibiotics in the first part of the 20th century, extremely common bacterial diseases and infections were a leading cause of death, restraining the human life expectancy at birth to just 47 years. That’s all you got. After antibiotics became available, that number rose to 79 years in developed countries. That’s a dramatic difference, making antibiotics one of the most literally life saving inventions of all time. But did you know, they were sort of discovered by accident? And did you know, that despite all their success, there is a dangerous down side to these wonder drugs? Let’s fix that.
Hello, I’m Shea LaFountaine and you’re listening to History Fix where I discuss lesser known true stories from history you won’t be able to stop thinking about. Few human advancements have made as big of an impact as antibiotics. But what I find so interesting is that it didn’t happen until very recently, like way more recently than I think most people realize. Antibiotics were not used really, effectively until the 1940s. So for almost all of human history, we were plagued by infectious diseases: cholera, diphtheria, pneumonia, typhoid fever, scarlet fever, bubonic plague, tuberculosis, dysentery, typhus, syphilis. These were leading causes of death, especially in young children and the elderly until antibiotics became readily available and vaccines of course helped with the non bacterial stuff like smallpox and polio. At that point, leading causes of death shifted from infectious diseases to stuff like cardiovascular disease, cancer, and stroke. The older population grew from just 4% of the total US population to 13% according to a National Library of Medicine article. And the number of children’s lives that have been saved, that number is incalculable but likely very high. According to the World Health Organization, the under 5 mortality rate worldwide has reached an all time low, declining by 51% just in the last 20 years alone. So, I mean it’s in the numbers for sure. Antibiotics were a game changer for human life expectancy and mortality and it’s really remarkable just how quickly all of this happened.
But, while I will sing their praises, because they deserve to be praised, there is a darker side to antibiotics that we like to just kind of not think about and yet it looms over us, ever more threatening. And that is bacteria developing resistance to antibiotics because of overuse and misuse and we’ll get into that a little bit later. But there’s another threat that most people are completely unaware of pertaining to a particular family of antibiotics that I have to tell you about because it might literally save your life. And I’m gonna get real personal and vulnerable with it because this is something that has and actively is affecting my family in a big way. It’s the reason my husband has experienced chronic pain every day for the last three years. It’s the reason he is physically disabled, for all intents and purposes, although he doesn’t like to accept that. It’s the reason he’s had to give up almost everything he used to enjoy doing fishing, playing music, riding a bike, or simply standing for more than a few minutes at a time. And the antibiotic that did that to him, you’ve probably taken it. It’s incredibly dangerous because of the possibility of adverse side effects like what he’s experienced and yet it’s incredibly overprescribed by doctors who either don’t know or are in denial about the potential harm it does. I’m going to get into all that, the tell all story, but first, let’s talk about the history of antibiotics.
We had no knowledge of the microscopic world until 1676 when a Dutch scientist named Antonie van Leeuwenhoek (lay-when-hook) first laid eyes on bacteria using homemade microscopes. Examining a drop of water, he noted small organisms that seemed to be swimming around in it. He named them animalcules which is kind of cute, I think. Leeuwenhoek was the first to report observations of both bacteria and protists, which are like fungus, algae, and protozoa. But I don’t think anyone really understood how significant these observations were because it would be another almost 200 years before the link was made between microscopic organisms and disease. And I talked about this two weeks ago in the mental health episode. French chemist Louis Pasteur developed germ theory in the 1870s. He was trying to figure out why food decomposes and he was able to prove that it was microbes like the bacteria and protists that Leeuwenhoek had observed that were causing the food to rot. After that, it wasn’t too large of a leap to realize that microbes in the body were making people sick. And this became known as germ theory. But, honestly, people had been toying around with the idea even before this. According to a Harvard Library article on germ theory, animalcular theories had already existed pretty much since Leeuwenhoek discovered his animalcules 200 years before. But by the 19th century, these theories were associated with an outdated past. People thought of animalcules, microbes, as tiny invisible animals that flew through the air spreading disease. They were seen as fanciful, not scientific, sort of like Luna Lovegood’s wrackspurts or nargles in Harry Potter. They were like, “yeah that’s definitely not it.” But, turns out, it actually was pretty much it.
So they finally understand what’s making people sick now, but not until around 150 years ago and while antibiotics are still quite a ways off, this knowledge is certainly power. They are able to reduce mortality rates of some of these infectious diseases just by spreading awareness about germ theory. Like, “hey if you cough in that guy’s face when you have the flu, he’s probably going to get the flu too” or “hey if that raw meat has been sitting out for days in this heat, you probably shouldn’t eat it.” Stuff like that. According to that Harvard Library article quote “While germ theory may have revolutionized understanding of the causes of disease, it did not necessarily revolutionize treatment… The great decline in mortality associated with the end of the 19th century is not associated with the impact of the germ theory, but with improved sanitation and nutrition,” end quote. But that improved sanitation and nutrition came from an awareness of where these diseases were actually coming from.
So now we know, okay it’s germs that are making us sick. But how do we get rid of the germs? How do we kill the germs before they kill us? That was not easy to figure out. And yet, and yet humans had already been accidentally doing it for thousands of years. Ancient Egyptians would place moldy bread on infected wounds because they noticed it sometimes helped the wounds heal. Skeletal remains dating back to the year 350 from ancient Sudanese Nubia reveal traces of the antibiotic tetracycline. This is also found in late Roman period bones from Dakhleh Oasis in Egypt. According to a National Library of Medicine article quote “These samples showed discrete fluorochrome labeling consistent with the presence of tetracycline in the diet at that time. The postulated intake of tetracycline in these populations possibly had a protective effect because the rate of infectious diseases documented in the Sudanese Nubian population was low, and no traces of bone infection were detected in the samples from the Dakhleh Oasis,” end quote. So they are eating something that has this antibiotic, tetracycline in it and, probably unknowingly, protecting themselves from disease and infection. Reports from ancient Jordan, tell of red soil being used to treat skin infections and when this soil was tested in modern times, it did have antibiotic producing bacteria in it. Ancient Chinese herbalists used the artemisia plant for thousands of years to cure all kinds of illnesses. In the 1970’s, scientists were able to extract an anti-malarial drug from this plant. And, actually, quite a few herbs used in traditional Chinese medicine have been proven to have antimicrobial properties. So we’ve been sort of unknowingly using antibiotics forever really. We didn’t know they were killing microscopic organisms, we just knew they were working for whatever reason to heal people.
But it wasn’t until the late 19th century that we made any progress towards intentional antibiotics. A German physician named Paul Ehrlich noticed that certain chemical dyes were coloring some bacterial cells, but not others. Based on this observation, he theorized that it would be possible to come up with some substance that killed certain bacteria without harming other cells. And in 1909, he did just that when he developed arsphenamine which goes by the name Salvarsan to effectively treat syphilis which was ravaging the population at that time. This drug, arsphenamine or Salvarsan, is considered the first antibiotic. Although, that term, antibiotic didn’t exist yet. Ehrlich actually called it chemotherapy which of course has a different connotation now as mostly just a treatment for cancer. So while arsphenamine could treat syphilis and a few other things, it wasn’t really covering all the bases. But it did open the door for the development of more drugs that could similarly kill life threatening bacteria while, theoretically, sparing healthy cells.
And that brings us to September 28, 1928 when Scottish physician and microbiologist Alexander Fleming returned from a summer vacation in Scotland to his lab at St. Mary’s Hospital in London. Now, Fleming had not exactly left a tidy lab when he headed back home to Scotland for the summer. He had left a petri dish containing Staphylococcus bacteria out. And upon his return, he noticed that there was now mold growing in the petri dish. It was a type of fungus called Penicillium notatum. So, okay, like gross dude, why is your lab so messy that there is fungus growing on stuff. But, but it’s a blessing in disguise. Because, upon closer inspection, Fleming realizes that, wherever the fungus is growing in the petri dish, there is no bacteria. It was somehow preventing the growth of the Staphylococcus bacteria in those spots. Flashback to the ancient Egyptians with their moldy bread. The mold was killing the bacteria. It took a few weeks for Fleming to grow enough of this fungus to test his theory but he eventually concluded that yes, the penicillium fungus was inhibiting the growth of the bacteria and that it could very well be used to kill bacterial infections in humans. Speaking of that day of discovery, Fleming said quote “When I woke up just after dawn on September 28, 1928, I certainly didn’t plan to revolutionize all medicine by discovering the world’s first antibiotic, or bacteria killer. But I guess that was exactly what I did,” end quote. Which, just to be clear it wasn’t technically the first, but it would go onto be the most critical antibiotic discovered - penicillin.
And that’s pretty much where Fleming’s part in all this stops. He’s just like “yeah I know my lab’s messy, you’re welcome. None of you neat freaks would have ever discovered penicillin without me.” According to a PBS News Hour article by Dr. Howard Markel quote “Fleming had neither the laboratory resources at St. Mary’s nor the chemistry background to take the next giant steps of isolating the active ingredient of the penicillium mold juice, purifying it, figuring out which germs it was effective against, and how to use it. That task fell to Dr. Howard Florey, a professor of pathology who was director of the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology at Oxford University… This landmark work began in 1938 when Florey, who had long been interested in the ways that bacteria and mold naturally kill each other, came across Fleming’s paper on the penicillium mold,” end quote. Florey and his team of scientists, including biochemist Dr. Ernst Chain used penicillium mold cultures to experiment on mice. In 1940 they infected a group of 50 mice with streptococcus bacteria. The mice got really sick. They gave half of the mice the extract they had taken from the penicillium cultures and they all recovered and survived. The other half that were not given the medicine all died. They’re like “okay, this stuff really freaking works, this is incredible,” and they’re ready to start testing it on humans. But the problem was, they weren’t able to produce enough mold culture to treat a human. According to Dr. Markel in that PBS article, quote “In spite of efforts to increase the yield from the mold cultures, it took 2,000 liters of mold culture fluid to obtain enough pure penicillin to treat a single case of sepsis in a person.”
But, knowing they didn’t have enough of the stuff, they still gave it a go on a 48 year old man named Albert Alexander in September of 1940. Albert had been working in his garden when he nicked his face on a rose bush. The scratch became infected with both streptococcus and Staphylococcus bacteria. The infection spread to his eyes, scalp, lungs, and shoulder where he developed all of these horrible abscesses. A rose bush did this, watch out gardeners. Florey and Chain heard about this guy and got permission to inject him with their penicillium mold culture fluid extract stuff. After five days of injections, Albert started to recover but then they ran out and he died. So they’re like “yessss! It was working. I know he died but it was working!” and they just really need to figure out how to get enough of this stuff to effectively treat humans.
In 1941, Florey goes to the US with another one of his biochemists, Dr. Norman Heatley and they meet with American scientists in Peoria, Illinois to try to find a way to mass produce this stuff. Because, for some context, World War II is raging in Europe. This is right before the US was to enter World War II. I don’t know if many people realize this, but infection is the main killer in a war. Not getting shot in the head or blown up or blood loss or whatever, infection that sets in later. Cause, okay say you get shot in the arm. You’re wearing clothing, probably really dirty clothing cause you’ve been hanging out in a trench, right, a hole in the ground and you’re not showering or washing your clothes all that often. So when you get shot, the bullet goes into your arm, but so does some of your shirt and it’s filthy and there’s a really good chance that that wound is going to get infected. So, Europe is in the middle of a world war and the US is facing the inevitability of soon entering that war. They just did this twenty some years ago with World War I. They know how this goes. If there really is a miracle drug that can cure infections, dysentery, pneumonia… they really need this stuff. So the American scientists get involved at this point.
They pretty quickly realize that this fungus, penicillium notatum just is not able to produce enough penicillin to effectively treat people. It doesn’t matter how much of it they grow, it’s not enough. They need to find another strain, another species of this mold that would hopefully produce more penicillin. So they asked the army, actually, for help. The Army Transportation Corps collected thousands of mold specimens from flight destinations all over the world, or at least parts of the world that weren’t combat zones, and they sent them to the lab in Illinois. So they’re getting this mold sent to them from distant lands and they’re growing it and testing it, trying to find one that will produce enough penicillin. But none of these are the mold they’re looking for. Ironically, the mold they’re looking for is right there in Peoria, Illinois at a produce stand, growing on a cantaloupe. There is some uncertainty as to who actually picked up this moldy cantaloupe and brought it to the lab. Most accounts point to a lab assistant named Mary Hunt who was eventually nicknamed Moldy Mary, cute. So Mary, or whoever, some people think it was a different lady, whatever, Mary gets this moldy cantaloupe from a produce stand and brings it to the lab. She cuts off the moldy part and then they actually eat the cantaloupe. But they grow cultures with the moldy part she cut off and they test it. It’s a fungus called penicillium chrysogenum and it naturally produced 200 times the penicillin that the original fungus, penicillium notatum, produced. So they’ve found it. They’ve found their mold right there in Peoria. And they eventually enhance the penicillin production with mutation causing Xrays and filtration. They get it to make up to 1,000 times more penicillin than the original stuff.
And this is a game changer in the war. In World War I, the death rate from bacterial pneumonia was around 18%. That dropped to less than 1% during World War II after penicillin became available to armed forces. But it also helped avoid sepsis and gangrene from infected wounds. So, before this, and this is kind of horrible but it is what it is, when a medical convoy came in to field hospitals, surgeons would rush down to the line of wounded soldiers and they would start tearing off bandages, looking for wounds that weren’t too badly infected yet. Because if it was too far gone already, too infected, they wouldn’t waste their time working on that person. They would take the ones that actually had a chance of recovery. You know, you’re not going to invest time and energy working on someone with an infection that you know you can’t stop. It’s harsh, but it’s practical. But, according to Richard Conniff in a HistoryNet article called “Penicillin: Wonder Drug of WWII,” quote “when wounded soldiers started receiving penicillin on the battlefield, surgeons at the field hospitals quickly realized they could wait to inspect a wound until the patient was on the operating table… Now surgeons simply cleaned up wounds to remove pus and foreign matter, sprinkled them with penicillin powder, and stitched them closed, sending off the patient to recover with the help of regular penicillin injections. ‘The saving of time and the better results obtained by the early healing of such wounds is practically unbelievable,’ wrote one surgeon. It was a major advantage for surgical teams performing 30 or 40 wound closures a day, and an even bigger advantage for the patients. Among Allied troops, gangrene now occurred in just 1.5 cases per thousand, and they died about half as often as in the early years of the war,” end quote.
Now, notice he said “among allied troops.” The Germans did have penicillin. But they had nowhere near as much as the allied troops so they were having to use it quite sparingly and they were mostly still relying on sulfa drugs. So sulfa drugs of sulfonamides were a class of antibiotics discovered in the 1930s but, within a few years of use, bacteria had already developed resistance to them and they weren’t anywhere near as effective as penicillin. Now this is pretty surprising, because Germany was essentially a world leader when it came to developing pharmaceuticals. I talked about E. Merck Darmstadt, that German pharmaceutical company selling powdered mummy in the cannibalism episode. But they really dropped the ball on penicillin. Conniff says quote “Given the obvious potential of penicillin, the surprising thing is that Germany did not match the Allied effort… At Utrecht, in the occupied Netherlands, it had access to the world’s most complete collection of microbial specimens, including many penicillin cultures. German pharmaceutical companies were the unquestioned world leaders in developing chemical remedies, and they had opened the antibiotic era. But their sulfa drug know-how proved of little relevance in the quest for penicillin.” He goes on to say, quote “The German failure is even more remarkable because the BBC made regular broadcasts across Europe, in several languages, about the potential of penicillin… clandestine penicillin manufacturing effort[s were] soon… under way in occupied [France and] Denmark. In the Netherlands, researchers at a yeast and gin company dubbed their version of the drug Bacinol, to dampen German interest in the project. Fortunately, their German supervisor liked Jenever gin, one of the researchers later recalled, “‘so we made sure he got a lot. He slept most afternoons.’” end quote. So, I think it’s fair to say that penicillin played a bit of a role in helping the allied powers win World War II. It was a secret weapon that the enemy had not thought to invest in. Because fewer soldiers dying of infection, meant more soldiers on the battlefield. Dr. Howard Florey himself said in 1949 quote “too high a tribute cannot be paid to the enterprise and energy with which the American manufacturing firms tackled the large-scale production of the drug. Had it not been for their efforts there would certainly not have been sufficient penicillin by D-Day in Normandy in 1944 to treat all severe casualties, both British and American," end quote.
During the war, penicillin was mostly just used for the military. They were reserving it for military use. A guy named Dr. Chester Keefer was put in charge of rationing supplies of penicillin for civilian use. And at that point, it was restricted to cases where other treatment methods had already failed. But as the public became more aware of the drug and what it could do, this Keefer guy was just absolutely bombarded with requests for it. The New York Herald Tribune reported in October of 1943 quote “Many laymen - husbands, wives, parents, brothers, sisters, friends - beg Dr. Keefer for penicillin. In every case the petitioner is told to arrange that a full dossier on the patient's condition be sent by the doctor in charge. When this is received, the decision is made on a medical, not an emotional basis," end quote. According to the American Chemical Society quote “Fortunately, penicillin production began to increase dramatically by early 1944. Production of the drug in the United States jumped from 21 billion units in 1943, to 1,663 billion units in 1944, to more than 6.8 trillion units in 1945, and manufacturing techniques had changed in scale and sophistication from one-liter flasks with less than 1% yield to 10,000-gallon tanks at 80-90% yield. The American government was eventually able to remove all restrictions on its availability, and as of March 15, 1945, penicillin was distributed through the usual channels and was available to the consumer in his or her corner pharmacy,” end quote.
In 1945 Fleming, Florey, and Chain, but weirdly not Heatley, were all awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering and developing penicillin. In his acceptance speech, Fleming warned that the overuse of penicillin might lead to antibiotic resistance. But of course no one listened. Author Rustam I. Aminov says in a National Library of Medicine article called “A Brief History of the Antibiotic Era,” quote “The period between the 1950s and 1970s was indeed the golden era of discovery of novel antibiotics classes, with no new classes discovered since then,” end quote. So that was it really, just a few decades of experiment and discovery in which all of the antibiotics we have today came to be.
But Fleming’s warning really should have been heeded more than it was because bacterial resistance to antibiotics is a growing problem. So this is when a particular strain of bacteria stops responding to antibiotics. This is just a natural thing that living things do, we adapt. So let’s say you have an infection and you take antibiotics for it. But you don’t take a strong enough dose or you don’t take them for long enough. The antibiotics kill off most of the bacteria but some of them survive. And they survive because, for whatever reason, they are naturally more resistant to the antibiotics. They survive and reproduce and their offspring, their baby bacteria are also more resistant to the antibiotics. It’s survival of the fittest, natural selection. But in this way, bacteria become more and more resistant to antibiotics and they become less and less effective in treating infections. So antibiotics resistance is, in a way, natural. But it’s helped along when doctors incorrectly prescribe antibiotics. They either overprescribe them, give them out when they aren’t really needed, or they prescribe the wrong dosage or duration of use or just the wrong antibiotic for that particular type of bacteria. So an example of an antibiotic resistant bacterial infection is MRSA which stands for Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus aureus. MRSA was first noticed in 1961, less than a year after the antibiotic methicillin was introduced, which is a type of penicillin. By 1968 there was a major outbreak of MRSA infections at a hospital in Boston and it continues to be a problem worldwide because it’s so hard to treat.
According to the CDC, at least 28% of antibiotics prescribed in outpatient settings are not actually needed by the patients and up to half of all antibiotics prescribed in these settings may be misprescribed due to doctors prescribing the wrong antibiotic or the wrong dose or the wrong duration of use. So that, I mean that’s significant. This is a problem. My mother in law went to the doctor for a cold a few weeks ago and came home with antibiotics. You guys, you don’t need antibiotics for a cold. Colds are viral not bacterial. Stop taking Z packs if you don’t actually have a bacterial infection. This rampant overprescribing is contributing to the problem and it affects everyone on Earth. W.A. Adedeji writes in a National Library of Medicine article quote, “The threat of antibiotic resistance is real. Therefore, all the stakeholders must employ strategies to prevent and control antibiotic resistance in order to prevent an imminent post-antibiotic era, a condition that may be worse than pre-antibiotic era,” end quote. Scary stuff.
And you are one of those stakeholders he’s talking about. Please put the pressure on your doctor to actually run some tests, do a culture, something, do there actual job before just handing out super powerful blanket antibiotics without any proof or evidence that you even have a bacterial infection and please, please, please never ever ever unless you are definitely going to die without them and there is no other option, never take fluoroquinolone antibiotics.
And now we’ve reached the point in today’s episode where I tell you my personal horror story in the hopes that it might spare you the agony of what my husband lives with every day. And before I get into this, you should know, I’m not like one of those anti-modern medicine, anti-doctors people, at all. I got epidurals both times I gave birth. Would do it again 10 out of 10. You natural birth mamas are nuts. I mean, I salute you but you’re nuts. I got the covid vaccine and the booster. My kids are fully vaccinated. We take safe antibiotics when we actually need antibiotics and I’m pretty sure antibiotics have potentially saved my life on at least two occasions. Okay, so factor that in. Around three years ago, a couple months after having my second child, so we had a 2 year old and a 2 month old which means this was the worst possible time imaginable for this to happen, my husband started having groin pain. Never did figure out what caused that groin pain but it was bothersome enough for him to go to urgent care. The doctor who I would love to name but won’t saw him for approximately 5 minutes. She ran no tests, asked few questions, and he left with a prescription for ciprofloxacin which is a fluoroquinolone antibiotic and prednisone which is a steroid usually used to help with inflammation. He’s like “okay, doctor told me to take these, guess I’ll take them.” Didn’t know all that much about them, didn’t think to Google it, the doctor prescribed them, the pharmacist gave them to him, they must be fine. Well they weren’t fine at all and, here I’ll let him tell you the story. This audio is coming from a video he recorded a couple years ago. I asked him if he wanted to come talk about it on the show but he declined which is what I expected. He really can’t talk about it or think about it without it just really wrecking him mentally. So, this audio is a little old but it’s all still the same.
Joey - 0:00 – 1:45
So Joey says these two drugs are contraindicated which means you aren’t supposed to take them together. There is an FDA black box warning on fluoroquinolone antibiotics like cipro or levaquin, there’s a bunch though, there are like 60 generic versions of these so any time you’re prescribed antibiotics make sure they aren’t fluoroquinolones. Here’s a run down of all the warnings and this is coming directly from the FDA website quote “The FDA first added a Boxed Warning to fluoroquinolones in July 2008 for the increased risk of tendinitis and tendon rupture. In February 2011, the risk of worsening symptoms for those with myasthenia gravis was added to the Boxed Warning. In August 2013, the agency required updates to the labeling to describe the potential for irreversible peripheral neuropathy (serious nerve damage). In 2016, the FDA enhanced warnings about the association of fluoroquinolones with disabling and potentially permanent side effects involving tendons, muscles, joints, nerves and the central nervous system. Because the risk of these serious side effects generally outweighs the benefits… the FDA determined that fluoroquinolones should be reserved for use in patients… who have no alternative treatment options,” end quote. They also added additional warnings in 2018 for mental health side effects including problems with attention, disorientation, agitation, nervousness, memory impairment, and delirium and they also added a warning for hypoglycemia (which is low blood sugar) leading to hypoglycemic coma.
These antibiotics are incredibly strong. They kill everything. Which is why they are so often prescribed. The doctor goes “well, I don’t know what’s wrong with you but if it’s bacterial, this will kill it,” even though it literally says on the label do not prescribe these antibiotics unless there is no other treatment option available. A National Library of Medicine article about fluoroquinolone antibiotics states quote “Tendon rupture, nerve damage, and fluoroquinolone-associated disability syndrome has been reported for most fluoroquinolones when they are used for a long-term period, and these side effects are proposed to be potentially permanent,” end quote. And I just want to point out that Joey didn’t take them for a long-term period. He took them for like 2 weeks and he was 32 years old and in good health. It goes on to say quote “The safety profile of quinolones is being updated constantly, since some life-threatening adverse effects, such as aortic rupture and dissection caused by exposure to fluoroquinolones, have recently attracted additional warnings by the FDA in 2018. It is advised that fluoroquinolones are not to be used for patients with an aortic aneurysm, or the elderly, and only as a last-line defense,” end quote.
“Reserved for patients with no alternative treatment options,” “only as a last-line defense,” so you tell me why Joey was handed cipro with zero tests run, few questions asked, and without a diagnosis. That is not a last-line defense. That is a first-line halfway guess at a defense that didn’t work anyway but has ruined his life. And that’s typical. They give these out like candy. I’ve personally taken cipro on more than one occasion. In that same year the FDA updated the warnings, 2018, cipro was prescribed 6.7 million times in the US alone and levaquin was prescribed 3.9 million times and who even knows how many millions of times all the different generic brands of these were prescribed. And the response from the medical community about these debilitating side effects is weird. They basically refuse to acknowledge that it’s real, despite the FDA warnings. They’ll do absolutely nothing to try to help you. You can’t work but you can’t get disability benefits because you don’t have a diagnosis because no doctor will give you a diagnosis because they’re in denial about fluoroquinolone toxicity. I’m not a conspiracy theorist but my mind certainly jumps there. Why the denial? Is it because they’re liable and they’re trying to avoid getting sued. Oh yeah you can’t sue these guys either by the way. Everyone always asks if we’re going to sue. You can’t take down big pharma guys. People have tried. You’ll just spend all your money going around in circles and, once again, doctors won’t diagnose you with anything, so you have nothing concrete to prove anything. It’s a mess. A big life ruining mess.
Because living in chronic pain every second of every day is no joke. My husband is 35 years old. He should not be hobbling around wincing in pain like a 90 year old. He should not have had to give up everything he enjoyed doing at such a young age. He can’t take care of our kids without me which is heartbreaking. And people ask how he’s doing all the time and it’s like, not good, you know. It’s been three years and tens of thousands of dollars and we’ve seen very little change. That’s the sad truth of it. And every time someone asks it hits him all over again. Because this isn’t just a physical struggle, it’s incredibly mental as well. He doesn’t look sick. He doesn’t look like he’s in pain. I mean, sometimes he does because he’s literally limping but for the most part, he looks okay. And yet, in reality he’s suffering so much all the time. He’s met a lot of people with this same condition, fluoroquinolone toxicity or cipro poisoning, or sometimes it’s just called being floxed. As he sat in a regenerative medicine office in Los Angeles two years ago getting some sort of IV infusion or peptide injection or whatever, he got to chatting with a woman who was also experiencing this. She was a breast cancer survivor and she said that this was easily 10 times worse. That she would easily take cancer again over cipro poisoning. Hundreds of people experiencing this after taking fluoroquinolone antibiotics have committed suicide, choosing to end their lives rather than to go on suffering. So when I say today’s episode may very well save your life, I mean it.
I know this has been a huge bummer. We don’t like to burden people with it. But at the same time, if just feels like something no one knows. Like this huge threat no one knows about. We had no idea and if we had known, this wouldn’t be happening to us. Joey can’t talk about it, but I can. And if I can save just one person with this episode, then that’s huge. Please share this. Please tell everyone you know and please, do not take fluoroquinolone antibiotics. There is almost always another option available. Trust me, you don’t know until you know and then there’s no going back. It’s not worth the risk.
Thank you all so very much for listening to History Fix. I hope you found this story interesting and hopefully you even learned something new. Be sure to follow my instagram @historyfixpodcast to see some images that go along with this episode and to stay on top of new episodes as they drop. There is also a Reel there, and on my TikTok about fluoroquinolone toxicity. I would be very grateful if you would share that to help me get the word out and warn others about this life ruining condition. I’d also really appreciate it if you’d rate and follow this podcast on whatever app you’re using to listen, and go ahead and tell a friend or two about it, that’ll make it much easier to get your next fix.
Information used in this episode was sourced from Microbiology Society, National Library of Medicine, healthychildren.org, World Health Organization, Harvard Library, US Department of Agriculture, HistoryNet, The Atlantic, the US Food and Drug Administration, the American Chemical Society, MN Department of Health, PBS, and Live Science. As always, links to these sources can be found in the show notes.
Hey guys, Shea here. Don’t get excited, this isn’t new content, sorry. It’s just the last bit of this week’s antibiotics episode in a digestible chunk that’s easier to share. I really really want to get the word out about how dangerous fluoroquinolone antibiotics really are but not everyone wants to sit through a 45 minute podcast episode to get to that informtion. So if you’ve already listened to this week’s episode about the history of antibiotics than you’ve already heard this. But I really hope that you will share it with everyone. Because anyone who doesn’t know this is at risk of it happening to them. Knowledge really is power.
Thank you all so very much for listening to History Fix. I will be back on Sunday with a new full length episode. If you aren’t a History Fix listener and you just had this shared with you as a warning, my heart is singing, but also, we’d love for you to join us. You can find History Fix wherever you get your podcasts, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Youtube, other places. You can also connect with me on instagram or TikTok @historyfixpodcast. There you’ll find images that go along with each episode and can stay on top of new episodes as they drop. That’ll make it much easier to get your next fix.