Archive for October, 2008

The poisoning of America – Quinolone antibiotics

Tuesday, October 28th, 2008

The Poisoning of America: The Rise of ‘Mystery’ Illnesses Including Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Fibromyalgia, and Gulf War Syndrome

November 13, 2002 
 By Jason Alexander Uttley As the Twin Towers fell, the world watched in disbelief and shock. When the horror of it had finally hit us, a myriad of emotions washed over each of us. In the end, all we could do was to pick up the pieces, learn from our mistakes, and try to make our world a safer place. Perhaps from it all we learned that the institutions that we trust to protect and serve us, in fact need all of us to help them perform the difficult jobs that we demand of them. Our intelligence and law enforcement institutions need us, our financial institutions need us, and as we will unfortunately come to learn, our health care institutions also need us. Before I begin to unveil the silent enemy that has been busy causing more destruction than we will ever truly be able to comprehend, I must confess that I am not a doctor. I have no medical background whatsoever. So I cannot in any way establish as scientific fact what I’m about to share with all of you. While I believe the following to be true based upon my own personal experience, along with careful deduction based on hundreds of personal stories and information that I have found from a host of sources, medical authorities nearly everywhere will undoubtedly argue otherwise. At least, they will initially. I have no doubt though that when all is said and done, the voice of the people who have been living with so many “mysterious ailments” for so long will finally be heard. And when that happens I believe the medical community as we now know it will be turned upside down, and I would truly hope in the end, changed for the better. At the heart of this horrific story lies a group of antibiotics called the fluoroquinolones. Among the more common of these medications are: ciprofloxacin (Cipro), levofloxacin (Levaquin), norfloxacin (Noroxin), ofloxacin (Floxin), and trovafloxacin (Trovan). Serving an important role as a last line of defense against bacterial infections, these incredibly potent antibiotics have certainly done a tremendous amount of good. But then again, at what cost? Surely these are drugs that were never intended to be handed out like candy to everyone complaining of a sore throat, but in fact they were, just as they continue to be to this day. These are medications so potent that they can not only destroy most bacterial infections in no time, but they can also do permanent damage to the user in no time as well. The most widely prescribed of these medications is Cipro, invented in 1983, and which as we all came to learn in the wake of 9/11 is so powerful that it can take on the likes of a biological weapon such as anthrax. It is in fact the most widely prescribed antibiotic in the world. And it is, like many of the other fluoroquinolones on the market, perceived to be safe enough for widespread use. Unfortunately this perception is just about as wrong as wrong can be. The reason for this miscalculation is that the side effects associated with this particular type of medication actually behaves much differently than the way researchers expect them to. Side effects to medications are typically at their worst at the time they are taken. If side effects are noticed, then the use is terminated, and typically the resulting symptoms disappear over some period of time. This unfortunately is not the case with fluoroquinolones however. The side effects for these medications can last indefinitely, and often times are actually at their worst long after the medication has been stopped. Hence patients don’t even associate the medication with their symptoms at all much of the time, as frequently the symptoms weren’t even noticeable during the course of treatment. This type of effect is much less common, and is normally associated with medications that researchers can find in measurable amounts in the body at some point after treatment has ceased. But since fluoroquinolones are not found in measurable amounts very long after treatment has ceased, their side effects are labeled “bizarre” by those few doctors who understand this effect. The Center for Disease Control was obviously a little shocked to find an abnormally high incidence of side effects in those people they monitored who were in close enough in proximity to the anthrax letters that they ended up taking Cipro as a precaution. The Palm Beach Post recently reported that the CDC found that 57% of the members of that particular group reported some side effects while actually taking their medication, 16% with side effects severe enough to seek medical attention. This is just SLIGHTLY higher than the maker of Cipro reports is normal. But then, this is obviously a group of people who were watched very closely by the medical profession. As a result of their surprising finding though, the CDC was concerned enough to immediately begin a two year investigation to study of the long-term effects of Cipro. In any event, there are a few doctors who have been trying to tell us that the side effects are in fact much more prevalent than we have been led to believe. In a Wall Street Journal article from October of 2001 for example, Dr. David Flockhart, Chief of Clinical Pharmacology at the Indiana University School of Medicine, reported that he believed up to one third of all patients taking a fluoroquinolone would experience a “severe psychiatric side effect.” But unfortunately such warnings typically fall on mostly deaf ears. According to the Palm Beach Post article, Cipro alone has been prescribed over 280 million times since it was first introduced. So, where are all the people who are suffering side effects from these medications if this is such a problem you ask? Well if we follow the clues, they will unfortunately lead us down a rather stunning road that is almost impossible to comprehend how it has been missed. If we begin by looking at this particular group of people that the CDC has been monitoring, and from what we know from the patients who have experienced known side effects from fluoroquinolones, it becomes clear that the more anxiety and stress that one is under at the time they take the medication, the higher the incidence of side effects will be. Why would this be? Well, the reason for this is almost certainly related to muscle tension, as the CDC will hopefully come to learn over the course of its investigation. The more stress your muscles are under at the time you take the medication, the more likely you are to experience noticeable side effects. To understand this, one need simply look to the history these antibiotics. In late 1970’s researchers attempting to make the already rather potent group of antibiotics known as quinolones even more potent, decided to attach fluoride to the quinolone group. Fluoride unfortunately is a known poison to the human body, more toxic than lead, and in fact nearly as toxic as arsenic. Fluoride exposure, among other things, disrupts the synthesis of collagen and leads to the breakdown of collagen in the muscles, tendons, cartilage, bones, kidneys, lungs, and skin. This in fact is the reason that muscle tension appears to play such an important role in the propensity of people to have more noticeable side effects while taking these drugs if they are under greater amounts of stress at the time. Already tense muscles are made even more tense as the muscles begin to breakdown. Unbeknownst to many Americans I think, including myself until quite recently, almost half of Gulf War veterans experienced what we have come to term “Gulf War Syndrome.” Years later many of those veterans were diagnosed with the mysterious conditions we have come to term Fibromyalgia and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. While we don’t for sure what medications those soldiers were given, as they themselves don’t even know, we do know the military stocked up on Cipro during the time of the Gulf War, and we can certainly make an educated guess that there was a good chance that the military had reason to suspect that biological agents such as anthrax would be used against them. And obviously we can all imagine that soldiers are under more stress than the average person, particular during times of war. But then, what do we know of these two relatively new conditions, Fibromyalgia and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, which are often so difficult to diagnose that most physicians will only make such a diagnosis by the process of elimination? We know that millions of Americans have actually been diagnosed with these conditions despite the long winding road that it generally takes for such a diagnosis. And in a rather eerie coincidence, we know that there are in fact several other conditions, which we have also become increasingly familiar with, that also share many of those very same symptoms. Such conditions include Irritable Bowel Syndrome, Multiple Chemical Sensitivity Syndrome, Chronic Myofascial Pain Syndrome, and Peripheral Neuropathy. While some of the people who suffer from these latter conditions do appear to have a known cause, many experience these conditions for reasons physicians don’t understand. Yet, almost unbelievably, all of these conditions appear to produce very nearly the same symptoms that are found in people who experience side effects from fluoroquinolones. Is it possible that all of these different conditions include millions of people who have actually been misdiagnosed and are actually experiencing long-term side effects from the fluoroquinolones? Well, we do know that there are a number of different fluoroquinolones on the market, and that there are obviously a lot of variations on how each person carries their own normal amount of the muscle tension. Therefore depending on each individual, is it possible that each of us might respond in slightly different ways to a drug that has the net effect of causing our muscles to tense up even more? Not only possible, but highly likely one would imagine. Of course the potency level and the amount of time that individuals are exposed to these toxic medications also accounts for a huge range in the amount and severity of their symptoms. While some people do experience immediate and severe side effects right away, probably based on either their increased level of muscle tension, or even possibly on their genetic susceptibility to these drugs, the majority of people undoubtedly respond in very similar ways. Therefore, most of the people who fall into those more severe side effect categories probably generally tend to have greater exposure, higher potency levels, or are under more stress than the average person. Gulf War veterans, like those people the CDC has been monitoring for anthrax exposure, along with millions of their fellow citizens have all, it would seem from the circumstantial evidence and deductive reasoning, experienced those more severe side effects. Yet does this mean that those people who have had lesser exposure levels, or have lower normal stress levels at the time they take these medications haven’t had any symptoms at all? The answer to this question unfortunately may well be almost beyond imagination, and yet in hindsight is all too obvious. For we are still missing the biggest group of all affected by such drugs. The group in which muscle stiffness and related problems are normally put first. The group in which most of the people whose conditions eventually worsen to the point that they are eventually diagnosed with one of the more severe related conditions, in fact ALL tend to begin their long battles. The catchall condition for such mysterious ailments, stress and anxiety disorders. While there can be no doubt that there are certainly millions of people who do have stress and anxiety related problems that are not a result of these medications, is the fact that there has been such a growth in these conditions over the past twenty years just a coincidence? “These are simply stressful times,” we’ve all been told time and time again. Apparently more stressful than the Vietnam era, or the World War II era, or the Great Depression era, or at any time during our entire history. Nevermind that the standard of living has actually increased during that same time period, or that most of us can now watch war from the safety of our living rooms. The fact is, it would certainly seem, we have all been blinded from the horrible truth. The truth, that the most widely prescribed antibiotics in the world have in fact been creating chronic health problems across our entire nation. Probably the only scientific way to really be able to prove the validity of such an seemingly outrageous claim, would be to see if there was a cause-effect relationship to those who took such an antibiotic and then, some months later even, began experiencing “stress and anxiety” related symptoms. Of course the less scientific method would be to just ask people who suffer such symptoms if they think there is in fact such a relationship. Many people may come to the quick realization that all their health problems began to deteriorate during, or in the months following, the taking of one of these drugs. But unfortunately in the state of the “modern” health care system, doctors normally only have a few short minutes for such patients. This perhaps is much of the reason why this epidemic has gone almost completely undetected by much of the medical community over the past twenty years. Only a handful of doctors in the nation really have been able to see this problem, and they still have yet to get our full attention. Will the CDC come to understand the full scope of this disaster as they continue to investigate those people who they’ve been monitoring so closely related to the anthrax scare of 2001, or will this group of people also slowly get put into one of these growing categories of victims of the fluoroquinolones? Even patients who have experienced immediate and severe enough side effects to KNOW that their symptoms were caused by a fluoroquinolone usually are not successful in convincing their doctors. This is because most doctors tend to rely on the information provided to them by the pharmaceutical companies, and therefore signed off on by the FDA, regarding the stated side effects to all drugs. It is a near impossible task to convince a doctor that they are not being told the full story. Just ask the group of people on the Internet who refer to themselves as “Floxies.” This is a quickly growing group of people who experienced an immediate enough side effect that they made the connection to this type of drug. Naturally this is also a relatively pissed-off group of people, because not only are most unable to convince their doctors of what they know, but they’re also just a little ticked that no one ever told them that their side effects to these toxic drugs could be permanent. Just like all the other conditions mentioned previously their symptoms often include: joint pain, muscle stiffness/aches, tendon pain, dizziness, disorientation, burning and tingling sensations, numbness, diarrhea, sensory sensitivities, and brain fog. Naturally, some have even worse symptoms, while others don’t experience nearly as many. Across all of these various conditions though, one finds that anti-stress and anxiety-related drugs generally tend to help reduce or even eliminate symptoms in many cases. This is probably because the muscles, tendons, and joints generally tend to be the first areas affected in the majority of people, and even many of the more worrisome symptoms tend to, at least initially, be related to severe muscle tension. Fluoride’s toxic effects, however, actually extend far beyond simply the disruption of the synthesis of collagen in the body. Fluoride can also have severe and sometimes permanent neurological effects, which can be reflected in side effects such as seizures at times, or equally serious but much less outwardly obvious related problems (i.e. Attention Deficit Disorder, Alzheimer’s, etc.). Fluoride can also cause great damage to the body’s immune system by depleting the energy reserves and the ability of white blood cells to properly destroy foreign agents, and by inhibiting antibody formation in the blood (i.e. causing increased susceptibility to illness, and possibly even Lupus). Fluoride can cause gastrointestinal problems, depress thyroid activity, and cause cardiovascular problems (perhaps due to its effect on the heart “muscle”). All these known side effects leads one to the all too real conclusion that the disorders listed already may very well be only part of all the damage that the fluoroquinolones have done over the years. While the FDA undoubtedly believes that a toxin such as fluoride is a necessary evil in the world in which we live, it would certainly appear they have made a grave miscalculation in turning a blind eye to its effects on the human body. The short and long-term effects of all drugs and the components which make them up should be measured and fully understood, especially if they are to be used for non-life threatening conditions. Of course, the FDA is far from alone in the blame for allowing this horrific tragedy to occur. We are all ultimately responsible when we allow our institutions, which we have created to protect and serve us, to act so irresponsibly. Our whole health care system has in fact failed us, and yet, we can never forget that we have also failed ourselves. The Gulf War veterans were never told exactly what medications they were given, despite the fact that many believed that their health problems actually stemmed from the “preventative drugs” that they took. In ignoring the health of our Gulf War veterans who bravely fought to help contain one of the great evils of our world, ironically it would seem, we have in fact been ignoring another one of the great evils of our world. In the end, perhaps our soldiers will once again be the key to restoring the freedom and way of life that our nation values so dearly. (c) Jason Alexander Uttley. Reprinted with permission from the author.

Posted in Fibromyalgia from quinolones, Gulf War syndrome - quinolones, Horrendous suffering, Long term damage from Quinolone antibiotics | 4 Comments »

Here is an off topic article on Vaccine manufacturer and government cover-up.

Sunday, October 26th, 2008

When a study revealed that mercury in childhood vaccines may have caused autism in thousands of kids, the government rushed to conceal the data — and to prevent parents from suing drug companies for their role in the epidemic.
by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
 
In June 2000, a group of top government scientists and health officials gathered for a meeting at the isolated Simpsonwood conference center in Norcross, Ga. Convened by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the meeting was held at this Methodist retreat center, nestled in wooded farmland next to the Chattahoochee River, to ensure complete secrecy. The agency had issued no public announcement of the session — only private invitations to 52 attendees. There were high-level officials from the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration, the top vaccine specialist from the World Health Organization in Geneva, and representatives of every major vaccine manufacturer, including GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, Wyeth and Aventis Pasteur. All of the scientific data under discussion, CDC officials repeatedly reminded the participants, was strictly “embargoed.” There would be no making photocopies of documents, no taking papers with them when they left.The federal officials and industry representatives had assembled to discuss a disturbing new study that raised alarming questions about the safety of a host of common childhood vaccines administered to infants and young children. According to a CDC epidemiologist named Tom Verstraeten, who had analyzed the agency’s massive database containing the medical records of 100,000 children, a mercury-based preservative in the vaccines — thimerosal — appeared to be responsible for a dramatic increase in autism and a host of other neurological disorders among children. “I was actually stunned by what I saw,” Verstraeten told those assembled at Simpsonwood, citing the staggering number of earlier studies that indicate a link between thimerosal and speech delays, attention-deficit disorder, hyperactivity and autism. Since 1991, when the CDC and the FDA had recommended that three additional vaccines laced with the preservative be given to extremely young infants — in one case, within hours of birth — the estimated number of cases of autism had increased fifteenfold, from one in every 2,500 children to one in 166 children.Even for scientists and doctors accustomed to confronting issues of life and death, the findings were frightening. “You can play with this all you want,” Dr. Bill Weil, a consultant for the American Academy of Pediatrics, told the group. The results “are statistically significant.” Dr. Richard Johnston, an immunologist and pediatrician from the University of Colorado whose grandson had been born early on the morning of the meeting’s first day, was even more alarmed. “My gut feeling?” he said. “Forgive this personal comment — I do not want my grandson to get a thimerosal-containing vaccine until we know better what is going on.”But instead of taking immediate steps to alert the public and rid the vaccine supply of thimerosal, the officials and executives at Simpsonwood spent most of the next two days discussing how to cover up the damaging data. According to transcripts obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, many at the meeting were concerned about how the damaging revelations about thimerosal would affect the vaccine industry’s bottom line.“We are in a bad position from the standpoint of defending any lawsuits,” said Dr. Robert Brent, a pediatrician at the Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children in Delaware. “This will be a resource to our very busy plaintiff attorneys in this country.” Dr. Bob Chen, head of vaccine safety for the CDC, expressed relief that “given the sensitivity of the information, we have been able to keep it out of the hands of, let’s say, less responsible hands.” Dr. John Clements, vaccines advisor at the World Health Organization, declared flatly that the study “should not have been done at all” and warned that the results “will be taken by others and will be used in ways beyond the control of this group. The research results have to be handled.”In fact, the government has proved to be far more adept at handling the damage than at protecting children’s health. The CDC paid the Institute of Medicine to conduct a new study to whitewash the risks of thimerosal, ordering researchers to “rule out” the chemical’s link to autism. It withheld Verstraeten’s findings, even though they had been slated for immediate publication, and told other scientists that his original data had been “lost” and could not be replicated. And to thwart the Freedom of Information Act, it handed its giant database of vaccine records over to a private company, declaring it off-limits to researchers. By the time Verstraeten finally published his study in 2003, he had gone to work for GlaxoSmithKline and reworked his data to bury the link between thimerosal and autism.Vaccine manufacturers had already begun to phase thimerosal out of injections given to American infants — but they continued to sell off their mercury-based supplies of vaccines until last year. The CDC and FDA gave them a hand, buying up the tainted vaccines for export to developing countries and allowing drug companies to continue using the preservative in some American vaccines — including several pediatric flu shots as well as tetanus boosters routinely given to 11-year-olds.The drug companies are also getting help from powerful lawmakers in Washington. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, who has received $873,000 in contributions from the pharmaceutical industry, has been working to immunize vaccine makers from liability in 4,200 lawsuits that have been filed by the parents of injured children. On five separate occasions, Frist has tried to seal all of the government’s vaccine-related documents — including the Simpsonwood transcripts — and shield Eli Lilly, the developer of thimerosal, from subpoenas. In 2002, the day after Frist quietly slipped a rider known as the “Eli Lilly Protection Act” into a homeland security bill, the company contributed $10,000 to his campaign and bought 5,000 copies of his book on bioterrorism. Congress repealed the measure in 2003 — but earlier this year, Frist slipped another provision into an anti-terrorism bill that would deny compensation to children suffering from vaccine-related brain disorders. “The lawsuits are of such magnitude that they could put vaccine producers out of business and limit our capacity to deal with a biological attack by terrorists,” says Andy Olsen, a legislative assistant to Frist.

Even many conservatives are shocked by the government’s effort to cover up the dangers of thimerosal. Rep. Dan Burton, a Republican from Indiana, oversaw a three-year investigation of thimerosal after his grandson was diagnosed with autism. “Thimerosal used as a preservative in vaccines is directly related to the autism epidemic,” his House Government Reform Committee concluded in its final report. “This epidemic in all probability may have been prevented or curtailed had the FDA not been asleep at the switch regarding a lack of safety data regarding injected thimerosal, a known neurotoxin.” The FDA and other public-health agencies failed to act, the committee added, out of “institutional malfeasance for self protection” and “misplaced protectionism of the pharmaceutical industry.”

The story of how government health agencies colluded with Big Pharma to hide the risks of thimerosal from the public is a chilling case study of institutional arrogance, power and greed. I was drawn into the controversy only reluctantly. As an attorney and environmentalist who has spent years working on issues of mercury toxicity, I frequently met mothers of autistic children who were absolutely convinced that their kids had been injured by vaccines. Privately, I was skeptical. I doubted that autism could be blamed on a single source, and I certainly understood the government’s need to reassure parents that vaccinations are safe; the eradication of deadly childhood diseases depends on it. I tended to agree with skeptics like Rep. Henry Waxman, a Democrat from California, who criticized his colleagues on the House Government Reform Committee for leaping to conclusions about autism and vaccinations. “Why should we scare people about immunization,” Waxman pointed out at one hearing, “until we know the facts?”

It was only after reading the Simpsonwood transcripts, studying the leading scientific research and talking with many of the nation’s preeminent authorities on mercury that I became convinced that the link between thimerosal and the epidemic of childhood neurological disorders is real. Five of my own children are members of the Thimerosal Generation — those born between 1989 and 2003 — who received heavy doses of mercury from vaccines. “The elementary grades are overwhelmed with children who have symptoms of neurological or immune-system damage,” Patti White, a school nurse, told the House Government Reform Committee in 1999. “Vaccines are supposed to be making us healthier; however, in 25 years of nursing I have never seen so many damaged, sick kids. Something very, very wrong is happening to our children.” More than 500,000 kids currently suffer from autism, and pediatricians diagnose more than 40,000 new cases every year. The disease was unknown until 1943, when it was identified and diagnosed among 11 children born in the months after thimerosal was first added to baby vaccines in 1931.

Some skeptics dispute that the rise in autism is caused by thimerosal-tainted vaccinations. They argue that the increase is a result of better diagnosis — a theory that seems questionable at best, given that most of the new cases of autism are clustered within a single generation of children. “If the epidemic is truly an artifact of poor diagnosis,” scoffs Dr. Boyd Haley, one of the world’s authorities on mercury toxicity, “then where are all the 20-year-old autistics?” Other researchers point out that Americans are exposed to a greater cumulative “load” of mercury than ever before, from contaminated fish to dental fillings, and suggest that thimerosal in vaccines may be only part of a much larger problem. It’s a concern that certainly deserves far more attention than it has received — but it overlooks the fact that the mercury concentrations in vaccines dwarf other sources of exposure to our children.

What is most striking is the lengths to which many of the leading detectives have gone to ignore — and cover up — the evidence against thimerosal. From the very beginning, the scientific case against the mercury additive has been overwhelming. The preservative, which is used to stem fungi and bacterial growth in vaccines, contains ethylmercury, a potent neurotoxin. Truckloads of studies have shown that mercury tends to accumulate in the brains of primates and other animals after they are injected with vaccines — and that the developing brains of infants are particularly susceptible. In 1977, a Russian study found that adults exposed to much lower concentrations of ethylmercury than those given to American children still suffered brain damage years later. Russia banned thimerosal from children’s vaccines 20 years ago, and Denmark, Austria, Japan, Great Britain and all the Scandinavian countries have since followed suit.

“You couldn’t even construct a study that shows thimerosal is safe,” says Haley, who heads the chemistry department at the University of Kentucky. “It’s just too darn toxic. If you inject thimerosal into an animal, its brain will sicken. If you apply it to living tissue, the cells die. If you put it in a petri dish, the culture dies. Knowing these things, it would be shocking if one could inject it into an infant without causing damage.”

Internal documents reveal that Eli Lilly, which first developed thimerosal, knew from the start that its product could cause damage — and even death — in both animals and humans. In 1930, the company tested thimerosal by administering it to 22 patients with terminal meningitis, all of whom died within weeks of being injected — a fact Lilly didn’t bother to report in its study declaring thimerosal safe. In 1935, researchers at another vaccine manufacturer, Pittman-Moore, warned Lilly that its claims about thimerosal’s safety “did not check with ours.” Half the dogs Pittman injected with thimerosal-based vaccines became sick, leading researchers there to declare the preservative “unsatisfactory as a serum intended for use on dogs.”

In the decades that followed, the evidence against thimerosal continued to mount. During the Second World War, when the Department of Defense used the preservative in vaccines on soldiers, it required Lilly to label it “poison.” In 1967, a study in Applied Microbiology found that thimerosal killed mice when added to injected vaccines. Four years later, Lilly’s own studies discerned that thimerosal was “toxic to tissue cells” in concentrations as low as one part per million — 100 times weaker than the concentration in a typical vaccine. Even so, the company continued to promote thimerosal as “nontoxic” and also incorporated it into topical disinfectants. In 1977, 10 babies at a Toronto hospital died when an antiseptic preserved with thimerosal was dabbed onto their umbilical cords.

In 1982, the FDA proposed a ban on over-the-counter products that contained thimerosal, and in 1991 the agency considered banning it from animal vaccines. But tragically, that same year, the CDC recommended that infants be injected with a series of mercury-laced vaccines. Newborns would be vaccinated for hepatitis B within 24 hours of birth, and 2-month-old infants would be immunized for haemophilus influenzae B and diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis.

The drug industry knew the additional vaccines posed a danger. The same year that the CDC approved the new vaccines, Dr. Maurice Hilleman, one of the fathers of Merck’s vaccine programs, warned the company that 6-month-olds who were administered the shots would suffer dangerous exposure to mercury. He recommended that thimerosal be discontinued, “especially when used on infants and children,” noting that the industry knew of nontoxic alternatives. “The best way to go,” he added, “is to switch to dispensing the actual vaccines without adding preservatives.”

For Merck and other drug companies, however, the obstacle was money. Thimerosal enables the pharmaceutical industry to package vaccines in vials that contain multiple doses, which require additional protection because they are more easily contaminated by multiple needle entries. The larger vials cost half as much to produce as smaller, single-dose vials, making it cheaper for international agencies to distribute them to impoverished regions at risk of epidemics. Faced with this “cost consideration,” Merck ignored Hilleman’s warnings, and government officials continued to push more and more thimerosal-based vaccines for children. Before 1989, American preschoolers received only three vaccinations — for polio, diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis and measles-mumps-rubella. A decade later, thanks to federal recommendations, children were receiving a total of 22 immunizations by the time they reached first grade.

As the number of vaccines increased, the rate of autism among children exploded. During the 1990s, 40 million children were injected with thimerosal-based vaccines, receiving unprecedented levels of mercury during a period critical for brain development. Despite the well-documented dangers of thimerosal, it appears that no one bothered to add up the cumulative dose of mercury that children would receive from the mandated vaccines. “What took the FDA so long to do the calculations?” Peter Patriarca, director of viral products for the agency, asked in an e-mail to the CDC in 1999. “Why didn’t CDC and the advisory bodies do these calculations when they rapidly expanded the childhood immunization schedule?”

But by that time, the damage was done. Infants who received all their vaccines, plus boosters, by the age of 6 months were being injected with levels of ethylmercury 187 times greater than the EPA’s limit for daily exposure to methylmercury, a related neurotoxin. Although the vaccine industry insists that ethylmercury poses little danger because it breaks down rapidly and is removed by the body, several studies — including one published in April by the National Institutes of Health — suggest that ethylmercury is actually more toxic to developing brains and stays in the brain longer than methylmercury.

Officials responsible for childhood immunizations insist that the additional vaccines were necessary to protect infants from disease and that thimerosal is still essential in developing nations, which, they often claim, cannot afford the single-dose vials that don’t require a preservative. Dr. Paul Offit, one of CDC’s top vaccine advisors, told me, “I think if we really have an influenza pandemic — and certainly we will in the next 20 years, because we always do — there’s no way on God’s earth that we immunize 280 million people with single-dose vials. There has to be multidose vials.”

But while public-health officials may have been well-intentioned, many of those on the CDC advisory committee who backed the additional vaccines had close ties to the industry. Dr. Sam Katz, the committee’s chair, was a paid consultant for most of the major vaccine makers and shares a patent on a measles vaccine with Merck, which also manufactures the hepatitis B vaccine. Dr. Neal Halsey, another committee member, worked as a researcher for the vaccine companies and received honoraria from Abbott Labs for his research on the hepatitis B vaccine.

Indeed, in the tight circle of scientists who work on vaccines, such conflicts of interest are common. Rep. Burton says that the CDC “routinely allows scientists with blatant conflicts of interest to serve on intellectual advisory committees that make recommendations on new vaccines,” even though they have “interests in the products and companies for which they are supposed to be providing unbiased oversight.” The House Government Reform Committee discovered that four of the eight CDC advisors who approved guidelines for a rotavirus vaccine laced with thimerosal “had financial ties to the pharmaceutical companies that were developing different versions of the vaccine.”

Offit, who shares a patent on the vaccine, acknowledged to me that he “would make money” if his vote to approve it eventually leads to a marketable product. But he dismissed my suggestion that a scientist’s direct financial stake in CDC approval might bias his judgment. “It provides no conflict for me,” he insists. “I have simply been informed by the process, not corrupted by it. When I sat around that table, my sole intent was trying to make recommendations that best benefited the children in this country. It’s offensive to say that physicians and public-health people are in the pocket of industry and thus are making decisions that they know are unsafe for children. It’s just not the way it works.”

Other vaccine scientists and regulators gave me similar assurances. Like Offit, they view themselves as enlightened guardians of children’s health, proud of their “partnerships” with pharmaceutical companies, immune to the seductions of personal profit, besieged by irrational activists whose anti-vaccine campaigns are endangering children’s health. They are often resentful of questioning. “Science,” says Offit, “is best left to scientists.”

Still, some government officials were alarmed by the apparent conflicts of interest. In his e-mail to CDC administrators in 1999, Paul Patriarca of the FDA blasted federal regulators for failing to adequately scrutinize the danger posed by the added baby vaccines. “I’m not sure there will be an easy way out of the potential perception that the FDA, CDC and immunization-policy bodies may have been asleep at the switch re: thimerosal until now,” Patriarca wrote. The close ties between regulatory officials and the pharmaceutical industry, he added, “will also raise questions about various advisory bodies regarding aggressive recommendations for use” of thimerosal in child vaccines.

If federal regulators and government scientists failed to grasp the potential risks of thimerosal over the years, no one could claim ignorance after the secret meeting at Simpsonwood. But rather than conduct more studies to test the link to autism and other forms of brain damage, the CDC placed politics over science. The agency turned its database on childhood vaccines — which had been developed largely at taxpayer expense — over to a private agency, America’s Health Insurance Plans, ensuring that it could not be used for additional research. It also instructed the Institute of Medicine, an advisory organization that is part of the National Academy of Sciences, to produce a study debunking the link between thimerosal and brain disorders. The CDC “wants us to declare, well, that these things are pretty safe,” Dr. Marie McCormick, who chaired the IOM’s Immunization Safety Review Committee, told her fellow researchers when they first met in January 2001. “We are not ever going to come down that [autism] is a true side effect” of thimerosal exposure. According to transcripts of the meeting, the committee’s chief staffer, Kathleen Stratton, predicted that the IOM would conclude that the evidence was “inadequate to accept or reject a causal relation” between thimerosal and autism. That, she added, was the result “Walt wants” — a reference to Dr. Walter Orenstein, director of the National Immunization Program for the CDC.

For those who had devoted their lives to promoting vaccination, the revelations about thimerosal threatened to undermine everything they had worked for. “We’ve got a dragon by the tail here,” said Dr. Michael Kaback, another committee member. “The more negative that [our] presentation is, the less likely people are to use vaccination, immunization — and we know what the results of that will be. We are kind of caught in a trap. How we work our way out of the trap, I think is the charge.”

Even in public, federal officials made it clear that their primary goal in studying thimerosal was to dispel doubts about vaccines. “Four current studies are taking place to rule out the proposed link between autism and thimerosal,” Dr. Gordon Douglas, then-director of strategic planning for vaccine research at the National Institutes of Health, assured a Princeton University gathering in May 2001. “In order to undo the harmful effects of research claiming to link the [measles] vaccine to an elevated risk of autism, we need to conduct and publicize additional studies to assure parents of safety.” Douglas formerly served as president of vaccinations for Merck, where he ignored warnings about thimerosal’s risks.

In May of last year, the Institute of Medicine issued its final report. Its conclusion: There is no proven link between autism and thimerosal in vaccines. Rather than reviewing the large body of literature describing the toxicity of thimerosal, the report relied on four disastrously flawed epidemiological studies examining European countries, where children received much smaller doses of thimerosal than American kids. It also cited a new version of the Verstraeten study, published in the journal Pediatrics, that had been reworked to reduce the link between thimerosal and autism. The new study included children too young to have been diagnosed with autism and overlooked others who showed signs of the disease. The IOM declared the case closed and — in a startling position for a scientific body — recommended that no further research be conducted.

The report may have satisfied the CDC, but it convinced no one. Rep. David Weldon, a Republican physician from Florida who serves on the House Government Reform Committee, attacked the Institute of Medicine, saying it relied on a handful of studies that were “fatally flawed” by “poor design” and failed to represent “all the available scientific and medical research.” CDC officials are not interested in an honest search for the truth, Weldon told me, because “an association between vaccines and autism would force them to admit that their policies irreparably damaged thousands of children. Who would want to make that conclusion about themselves?”

Under pressure from Congress, parents and a few of its own panel members, the Institute of Medicine reluctantly convened a second panel to review the findings of the first. In February, the new panel, composed of different scientists, criticized the earlier panel for its lack of transparency and urged the CDC to make its vaccine database available to the public.

So far, though, only two scientists have managed to gain access. Dr. Mark Geier, president of the Genetics Center of America, and his son, David, spent a year battling to obtain the medical records from the CDC. Since August 2002, when members of Congress pressured the agency to turn over the data, the Geiers have completed six studies that demonstrate a powerful correlation between thimerosal and neurological damage in children. One study, which compares the cumulative dose of mercury received by children born between 1981 and 1985 with those born between 1990 and 1996, found a “very significant relationship” between autism and vaccines. Another study of educational performance found that kids who received higher doses of thimerosal in vaccines were nearly three times as likely to be diagnosed with autism and more than three times as likely to suffer from speech disorders and mental retardation. Another soon-to-be-published study shows that autism rates are in decline following the recent elimination of thimerosal from most vaccines.

As the federal government worked to prevent scientists from studying vaccines, others have stepped in to study the link to autism. In April, reporter Dan Olmsted of UPI undertook one of the more interesting studies himself. Searching for children who had not been exposed to mercury in vaccines — the kind of population that scientists typically use as a “control” in experiments — Olmsted scoured the Amish of Lancaster County, Penn., who refuse to immunize their infants. Given the national rate of autism, Olmsted calculated that there should be 130 autistics among the Amish. He found only four. One had been exposed to high levels of mercury from a power plant. The other three — including one child adopted from outside the Amish community — had received their vaccines.

At the state level, many officials have also conducted in-depth reviews of thimerosal. While the Institute of Medicine was busy whitewashing the risks, the Iowa Legislature was carefully combing through all of the available scientific and biological data. “After three years of review, I became convinced there was sufficient credible research to show a link between mercury and the increased incidences in autism,” says state Sen. Ken Veenstra, a Republican who oversaw the investigation. “The fact that Iowa’s 700 percent increase in autism began in the 1990s, right after more and more vaccines were added to the children’s vaccine schedules, is solid evidence alone.” Last year, Iowa became the first state to ban mercury in vaccines, followed by California. Similar bans are now under consideration in 32 other states.

But instead of following suit, the FDA continues to allow manufacturers to include thimerosal in scores of over-the-counter medications as well as steroids and injected collagen. Even more alarming, the government continues to ship vaccines preserved with thimerosal to developing countries — some of which are now experiencing a sudden explosion in autism rates. In China, where the disease was virtually unknown prior to the introduction of thimerosal by U.S. drug manufacturers in 1999, news reports indicate that there are now more than 1.8 million autistics. Although reliable numbers are hard to come by, autistic disorders also appear to be soaring in India, Argentina, Nicaragua and other developing countries that are now using thimerosal-laced vaccines. The World Health Organization continues to insist thimerosal is safe, but it promises to keep the possibility that it is linked to neurological disorders “under review.”

I devoted time to study this issue because I believe that this is a moral crisis that must be addressed. If, as the evidence suggests, our public-health authorities knowingly allowed the pharmaceutical industry to poison an entire generation of American children, their actions arguably constitute one of the biggest scandals in the annals of American medicine. “The CDC is guilty of incompetence and gross negligence,” says Mark Blaxill, vice president of Safe Minds, a nonprofit organization concerned about the role of mercury in medicines. “The damage caused by vaccine exposure is massive. It’s bigger than asbestos, bigger than tobacco, bigger than anything you’ve ever seen.” It’s hard to calculate the damage to our country — and to the international efforts to eradicate epidemic diseases — if Third World nations come to believe that America’s most heralded foreign-aid initiative is poisoning their children. It’s not difficult to predict how this scenario will be interpreted by America’s enemies abroad. The scientists and researchers — many of them sincere, even idealistic — who are participating in efforts to hide the science on thimerosal claim that they are trying to advance the lofty goal of protecting children in developing nations from disease pandemics. They are badly misguided. Their failure to come clean on thimerosal will come back horribly to haunt our country and the world’s poorest populations.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, chief prosecuting attorney for Riverkeeper and president of Waterkeeper Alliance. He is the co-author of “The Riverkeepers.”

This article just goes to show you that Ortho-McNeil and Bayer will do everything they can to deny that quinolones cause extensive damage just like Merck did to conceal mercury poisoning from vaccines.

 

 

 

 

Posted in The dangers of vaccines, statins and other drugs. | No Comments »

Visit to the doctor who prescribed me Levaquin

Friday, October 24th, 2008

Not too long ago I made an appointment with the Urologist who prescribed Levaquin to me. It has been over 3 years since I have been poisoned by Levaquin and I thought this doctor had moved out of state. I found out that he had just moved about an hour away. I made an appointment and I hobbled into his office. Sit there in the waiting room with a stack of Levaquin toxicity reports. Some lady is sitting there wearing tons of perfume. My head is constantly shaking back and forth. The perfume makes my head pressure feel worse. My legs are burning and my eyesight is jerking back and forth. Basically, a typical day in the life a Levaquin poisoned victim.

I get called back to his office. Before this clueless doctor comes in to see me I tape a medical report on his door from another doctor saying I am disabled due to Levaquin toxicity. I hear a little shuffling outside and he walks in. The first thing this arrogant doctor says to me is “I am not sure why you are even here.” I proceed to tell him I have been physically and neurologically crippled from the Levaquin you prescribed in combination with Aleve, an nsaid. He didn’t even feel remorseful. In fact, he felt more perturbed than anything. I looked at him like ” You’re mad at me!”  “What the hell are you mad at me for.”  ”I’m the one who is crippled not you.”  I proceeded to tell him that my main purpose is to try and educate him on the toxicity of Levaquin and how it is more common than rare. As I started to hand information to him from medical doctors on the toxicity of Levaquin he shook his head  and didn’t even want to look at it. Throughout the entire conversation he kept saying to me ” the care that I gave you was appropriate.” He sounded like a broken record. “How is giving Levaquin and Aleve appropriate care when they are contraindicated?”  Same response, “the care that I gave you was appropriate.” Essentially, like tens of thousands of other quinolone victims, no bacterial culture was ever done to see whether I even had an infection. And then I am told to take an nsaid along with Levaquin. All I simply had was some pain in my groin area and didn’t know what it was and was given Levaquin. I went to another Urologist recently who told me all the sporting activities I did, especially riding my bike, could have easily caused your condition. Wow, it looks like I never really even needed this poison.   

What really makes me furious is the cavalier attitude this Urologist had with me. He would never accept or acknowledge anything in regards to personal blame. Even more maddening is his refusal to even take a look at the information regarding the toxicity of quinolones. If I was a doctor and a patient brought this information in to me it would at least make me curious enough to want to take a look at it. I guess that is how the medical profession is today. When it comes to adverse drug reactions, especially ones they cause, they like to just quietly sweep it under the rug. The only person this doctor was concerned with was himself. I honestly think many doctors simply don’t want to know about drug side effects. It is a blow to their profession when what they do for a living actually causes the person to be worse off. For me it has been 3 years of being worse off. I’m actually one of the lucky ones compared to many others who have been poisoned by Levaquin, Cipro, or Avelox. At least I can get out of bed. The moral of my story is to never and I repeat never blindly trust what your doctor says regarding medications. Do your own research. Be your own advocate. Maybe this doctor was stuffing his pockets with all kinds of gifts from guys like me, a pharmaceutical sales rep. He probably felt like he needed to keep pleasing the Levaquin sales rep by writing more prescriptions thus getting in return more and more gifts. What a happy circle that is. Where does that all leave me- Disabled for 3 years.

Make it a priority to not let your family and friends end up like me. Educate others on the crippling effects of Levaquin and other quinolone antibiotics. Please forward my blog on to as many friends as possible and ask them to do the same. Ask them to read the links below and become educated and informed on the toxicity of these antibiotics. If I can prevent just one other person from being crippled this blog will have served its purpose.       

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Misty May-Treanor and torn achillis tendon

Monday, October 20th, 2008

There has been some speculation that olympic volleyball gold medalist Misty May Treanor’s torn achilles tendon is due from taking an antibiotic. Right now this is only speculation. It had been mentioned that she had possibly taken an antibiotic for an upper respiratory infection. If this did happen to be the result from an antibiotic I have no doubt that it is from a quinolone. I have never heard of another class of antibiotic causing this type of injury. Plus, the recent “black box” warning on quinolones for tendon rupture would make it even more logical.

Many years ago there was a very young and talented baseball pitcher for the Chicago Cubs who had damaged his throwing arm. He was so good that he was awarded the Cy young award for the best pitcher in the national league. Unfortunately, his name escapes me. The story goes that he had severely damaged some tendons in his throwing arm from being prescribed a quinolone antibiotic. The manufacturer quickly flew a couple of lawyers out to meet with him. He signed an agreement for a few million dollars in exchange for his silence about the damage being caused from the antibiotic. When a celebrity gets victimized by these antibiotics the last thing in the world the manufacturer wants in bad publicity. If a celebrity screams foul and warns the masses about an antibiotic causing severe injuries you can bet much of the world will listen and take notice. This young pitcher went from being a Cy Young award winner to his career being over in a short time period. The drug companies will simply do anything to keep quinolone toxicity from being known to the masses.

Ortho-McNeil, the manufacturer of Levaquin, even flew a few executives out to see a doctor in Utah to try and keep him from warning his fellow doctor friends about the damage from Levaquin. This doctor is still suffering from Levaquin toxicity two years after his last pill.  This doctor was simply telling his Levaquin story to other physicians and those physicians then started to prescribe less Levaquin. The doctor that is damaged from Levaquin said that the executives were not really even concerned about his injuries. They were just concerned about trying to supress any grass roots movement about Levaquin toxicity from being known to the public and to also disuade him from telling his physician friends. His name was even being brought up at district sales meetings in an effort to figure out what to do to about him.  It’s all about the money. Ortho-McNeil is a public company. And like any other public company they will do whatever they can to maximize shareholder wealth. It doesn’t matter that lives have been ruined. It matters only that the stock price is maximized.

Please warn and educate others about the crippling injuries caused by Levaquin and other quinolone antibiotics.    

Posted in Black Box warning- Quinolones | 2 Comments »

Damage from Quinolones is not rare

Thursday, October 16th, 2008

A prefect example of this is a guy named Tom Lefko. Tom now lives in California. Prior to that he went to the same small high school that I went to. We both graduated from Hershey high school. What are the odds of two people graduating from the same very small school that have been disabled for over three years from a quinolone antibiotic. It is not as low as many people would think. Tens of thousands of people are damaged by Levaquin, Cipro, Avelox and other quinolones each year.

It has been over three years since Tom was given Cipro in the hospital for a knee infection. Tom started to suffer from anxiety and insomnia while on Cipro and told his doctor about these symptoms. His doctor replied back to Tom saying “You’re just having anxiety from being in a hospital setting.”  Unfortunately, this is one of many cases of people being misdiagnosed by their physician. Tom suffers from severe anxiety, depression, insomnia, nightmares, chemical sensitivities, tendon pain, joint pain and a few other problems. He also had a seizure and a torn tendon. I have talked to Tom on the phone many times. He was a federal agent for Homeland Security prior to taking IV Cipro. He was in great health. He has lost his job as a federal agent due to all the damage that Cipro unmercifully inflicted on his body. I can remember him calling me during his acute Cipro toxicity stage saying he was thinking of ending it all because the pain was too much to bear. This is a similar response that many quinolone victims have. It is tragic that most physicains fail to recognize the severity of quinolone poisoning. The quinolone manufacturers -Ortho McNeil ( Levaquin ) and Bayer ( Cipro, Avelox ) continue to downplay the severity and occurance of these adverse drug reactions. That is why it is important for everyone reading this blog to make sure to warn family, friends, and anyone else willing to listen, about the crippling side effects of these antibiotics. Please visit the links below.   

Posted in Cipro poisoning, Long term damage from Quinolone antibiotics | No Comments »

Another terrible Levaquin tragedy – A child Levaquin victim.

Wednesday, October 8th, 2008

If there is one Levaquin story that sticks in my mind the most it is probably this one. Reproduced with permission from FQvictims.org

A 16  Year Old’s Story as written by her sister

The Story of a child Levaquin Victim

In March of 2000, my little sister, who was 16 years old, developed difficulty hearing in her right ear. Her ear, nose, and throat specialist ordered a CAT scan. The radiologist told her ENT doctor that she had a sinus infection. Apparently the ENT specialist didn’t bother to read the CAT scan and he concurred with the radiologist. We later found out after consultation with another doctor that a wisdom tooth had punctured the large right sinus cavity and she never had an infection. This fact should have been obvious to the radiologist and the ENT if he actually read the CAT scan.

Despite the misdiagnosis, this would not have been a problem if the ENT had prescribed a safe antibiotic for my sister. Instead he prescribed 500 mg of Levaquin once a day. He did this despite the numerous pediatric warnings that are clearly stated in bold and large font in the Physician’s Desk Reference. According to Ortho-McNeil, the maker of Levaquin, Levaquin is not supposed to be prescribed to anyone under the age of eighteen. The prescription was filled at a local Walgreens pharmacy, which provides Medi-Spam Corporation’s package inserts for patients. For some reason, Medi-Spam did not put the pediatric warning on their profiles even though the company that Osco uses does. Consequently, my family was not told by my sister’s doctors or the pharmacy that this medication was dangerous to children.

After my sister took the fifth Levaquin pill, it was if a bomb went off in her body. She collapsed at school and had to be half carried out of the building to my mother and me. She said every joint in her body ached; she was dizzy and her skin was raw with a rash. Her right wrist was red and swollen. My mother called the doctor. He refused to talk to her, but instead had the nurse tell my mother that my sister was having a “little allergic reaction” to the Levaquin and to give her a lot of water and Benadryl- which we did. The next day my sister could not get out of bed. All of her joints ached and she was in so much pain that she was curled up in the fetal position. She cried out when we opened the shade in her bedroom. She could not tolerate any light because she said it seemed as if someone was shining a high powered spotlight in her face every time she opened her eyes. She had a terrible headache, the rash persisted, she was sick to her stomach and her hands shook so much that it was difficult for her to even hold a glass of water. My mother kept calling the doctor and he refused to talk to her. After several calls, his nurse hollered at my mother and said: “I told you the doctor said it would take a couple of days for the medication to get out of her body.”  The nurse then called in a prescription for Biaxin, which my mother had told the ENT my sister could take safely. But it was too late.

Since the doctor was refusing help, I turned to the internet to see if anyone else had reported the same symptoms as my sister. As it turned out, it is not just children who have experienced the strange mix of symptoms that my sister experienced. We were shocked to find out that Levaquin (and indeed, all fluoroquinolones) has a questionable safety record for people of all ages. Seven fluoroquinolones have been pulled off the market in the United States because of severe adverse drug reactions like my sister’s, and many more have been pulled from worldwide markets, or their use has been restricted to life or death situations because of severe adverse drug reactions, including death due to heart and renal failure. Levaquin has not yet been pulled from the market, but because of my sister’s symptoms and the experiences of the other tens of thousands of people who I found out experienced the same symptoms, I believe it should be.

There was no doubt in our minds that my sister was not experiencing a mere allergic reaction. Allergic reactions are transient occurances, but her symptoms showed no signs of clearing up, and in fact, they were worsening by the day. Within days of her initial symptoms, her achilles tendons and rotator cuffs were at the point of rupturing. We had to rush her to the emergency room. The emergency room doctor looked at her chart and said: “who the hell is the moron who prescribed this medication?” It is never supposed to be given to anyone under the age of 18.” The doctor went on to say that anytime someone of any age came to the emergency room  with an unexplained tendon problem, she always asked if they had been prescribed a fluoroquinolone antibacterial, and she found quite often, they had been.

My sister was now in a boot cast and a sling in a desperate attempt to stabilize her tendons by immobilizing them. She could not tolerate natural or artificial light. She bagan to experience other nervous system symptoms, such as anxiety, hallucinogenic dreams, and, most frighteningly, a sudden unexplained compulsion to commit suicide. Please know that my sister had never experienced any psychiatric or psychological disturbances in her life, but that fluoroquinolones are known to induce psychological side effects, and suicide is now finally listed as a possible side effect of fluoroquinolone use. In the weeks that followed, my family took my sister to a series of doctors who ruled out arthritis, lupus, MS, and a host of other diseases. It always came back to the fact that she was fine before she took the Levaquin. When we realized that no doctor in Illinois could help her we took her to Georgetown University to see a man named Dr. David Flockhart. He said she had a severe adverse drug reaction to Levaquin and that it should never be prescribed to anyone under the age of 18, although he had seen many adult patients who experienced the same thing as my sister did. He said there is no cure for her condition- that the medication had penetrated her bones, her tendons, her muscles and her nerves. Levaquin is a negatively charged particle that tends to bind to positively charged calcium and magnesium found in the bones and soft tissue. He also said the Levaquin had blocked the GABA receptors in her brain, causing vision disturbances, tremors, rashes, and psychological effects. He said it would take five to six years for this medication to “grow” out of her body and then she would be left with the damage it had done to her bones, nerves, and soft tissues.

We began to deal with the fact that our lives were going to be changed forever. My sister went from being a healthy, active, extremely artistic 16 year old whose talent has helped her community and whose artwork has won awards to a teenager who couldn’t even lift a gallon of milk because of the pain in her hands and shoulders and the threat of a rotator cuff rupture. She went from being a proficient martial artist who was one step away from a black belt in Tae Kwon Do to a teenager forced to use wheelchair because her knees and ankles hurt so badly because the cartilage and tendons could spontaneously rupture at any moment. She went from being a happy-go-lucky teenanger with fourteen years of experience playing the piano to a world-weary young adult who learned all too well the challenges faced by people with disabilities.

For weeks and even months at a time, my sister has been unable to perform even the simplest functions, such as carrying schoolbooks or walking to class because of the pain, swelling, and the threat of tendon rupture in her limbs. She has experienced spontaneous tearing of the cartilage in her ribcage, including an unprovoked rupture while in her wheelchair on the way to one of her highschool classes. For the initial 4 months of the adverse reaction to Levaquin, she had to wear black sunglasses to block out all the light because she was so sensitive to light. Her vision returned to normal, but then some months later she lost her peripheral vision. It returned a few months later. Sometimes her symptoms are localized to areas of her body like her arms or feet, and sometimes they affect her entire body.

It has been 4 years now. My sister has been in 29 orthopedic casts for her arms and legs in order to prevent tendon ruptures. Her hands still shake. Periodically her vision is affected. Pain is now a daily factor in her life- as she says, it’s not a question of  when she is in pain, it is a question of how much pain she’s in every day. Typically, changes in the barometric pressure influence how much pain she’s in. She is our “walking weather person” because the pain becomes horrible for her when the weather changes. Periodically the tendonitis in her peroneal tendons and achilles tendons flar up so badly that she cannot walk. The tendons in her arms,wrists,hands,fingers,and shoulders still flair up, limiting her ability to do common daily tasks such as writing and typing. There are still days when the pain is so great she cannot get out of bed.

She has to use a wheelchair scooter on her college campus because she cannot walk long distances. She cannot open doors for herself and can only attend classes in buildings that are accessible not only in that they have elevators and ramps but buttons to open doors as well. During her freshman year, the plantar facia in her right foot ruptured while she was sleeping. The cartilage in her right knee began to flake off, which causes immense pain. She was my maid of honor in my wedding last year, but we were afraid up until the last minute that she would not be able to attend because her doctor raised the possibility of needing emergency surgery. As it was, she had to wear a full-leg cast on her leg under her dress and had surgery not long after my wedding.

What is most devastating, however, is that my sister is and has always been a talented artist. When she was a small child, she figured out how to draw three dimensional objects on her own. Her artwork has won awards both in and out of school since she was in grammer school. Her work was used by the Roselle police office for its DARE program when she was 11 years old. Her animation has been used by the College of Dupage as a teaching tool since she was 12. She baegan designing logos and artwork for area companies and schools in junior high and continues even today, as much as she is able to. She has consistently been described by every art teacher she has ever had as being a creative genius. Levaquin has stolen away her ability to use her god-given talents in career and volunteer activities. She can only draw for a few minutes or an hour a day, and even then she experiences pain when she does so. She had planned to be an animation artist since she saw her first Disney cartoon. Now, her dreams have been shattered. Her artwork is no less brilliant, but she simply cannot use her gifts to the extent that she otherwise would have been able to.

As you can tell, Levaquin has destroyed my sister’s life. It has taken away her health, career, and her ability to have a normal life. In fact, our whole family has been devastated by this sensless tragedy. My family was never warned that Levaquin could do this. Indeed, most doctors are not aware of the devastating, permanent adverse drug reactions caused by Levaquin and other fluoroquinolones, or if they know, they do not understand the seriousness of the situation. Some, like my sister’s ENT, flately refuse to acknowledge the possibility of adverse drug reactions at all, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The fact that the warnings required by the Food and Drug Administration are not adequate and do not acknowledge the severity and permanence of the adverse drug reactions does not help.

My mother has talked to the FDA numerous times. The last time, a womean in Sally Singer’s office said to my mother: ”There are so many angry people out there because of Levaquin. Some day we are going to have to do something about this drug.” When my mother asked when, she refused to answer my mother. The British have given Levaquin the Black Traingle-the equivalent of saying that a drug is under investigation to possibly be pulled from the market because of the severity of adverse drug reactions. Why has the FDA not placed Levaquin and other fluoroquinolones under such scrutiny.

On behalf of my sister, my mother is one of the tens of thousands who have filed adverse drug reaction reports with the FDA, yet she has never once received a phone call or email to follow up with her. No one at the FDA seems to be concerned that a child has had the rest of her life ruined because of a few pills.

The FDA and the drug companies feel that side effects like my sister’s are not considered “serious” because she is not dead. It doesn’t matter that my sister and all the other fluoroquinolone victims have had their lives ruined and are forced to live in constant pain.  -Story told on 1/1/05    

Please warn your friends and family about the crippling effects of Levaquin and other quinolones.

Posted in Horrendous suffering, Levaquin poisoning, Long term damage from Quinolone antibiotics | 2 Comments »

Visiting the doctor’s offices that I used to call on as a pharmaceutical sales rep

Wednesday, October 1st, 2008

It has been over three years now since I ingested the last of the poisonous Levaquin pills. The main reason for this website is to try and warn the public at large of the potential life altering and permanent reactions to Levaquin and other quinolone antibiotics. If I can help prevent healthy individuals from becoming permanently disabled from a quinolone antiobiotic I feel like I have made a difference in this world. I read somewhere a long time ago to “make your mess your message.” That’s what I am trying to do here.

In addition to that, I am also trying to do my best to hurt Ortho-McNeil’s sales of Levaquin as much as possible. Why not, they hurt me and thousands of others physically and financially. Each Levaquin pill costs a little over ten dollars so a standard prescription is a little over a hundred dollars. If I can convince physcians to stop prescribing Levaquin as a first line defense and use it instead only for severe or life threatening situations I will put a good dent in their sales in central Pennsylvania. I have now been to 41 different doctor offices that I used to call on with information packets about Levaquin toxicity. I have only been able to speak to about 11 doctors now. I have given out over 75 seperate information packets to the doctors though. Surprisingly, I have had three doctors call me at home about this. Two of the three were shocked and the other said he had known about the severe side effects of quinolones. I had a lot of good relationships built up with many physicians and I think some are now using  Levaquin as a last resort. It is very difficult for me to do this task with all the damage that Levaquin has caused but I need to keep up the pressure on the lying bastards at Ortho.  I have about another 40 offices to go to and will hopefully make it to them in the next couple months. Now with the Black Box warning out I think my message will be taken even more seriously. Enclosed in the Levaquin information packets are Dr. Cohen’s letter, info from Dr. Flockhart, Antibiotics.org, the Black Box warning info, Stan Cox’s article, and a few other letters of long term damage from these antibiotics.

I have a lot of other things planned to get nation wide exposure of this horrendous toxicity. I am very thankful and appreciative of everyone who has helped to bring this information to the public.    

  

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USA Today article- Antibiotics are the leading cause of medication related Emergency room visits

Wednesday, October 1st, 2008

Approximately one in every nine visits to the emergency room are the result of adverse reactions to medications according to a canadian study. One in five medication related visits are the result of antibiotics. This class of drugs account for more visits to the ER than any other class. I wonder what class of antibiotics accounts for the majority of these visists.  ….. Hmmm, I’ll take a wild guess here and say it’s quinolones. Levaquin, Cipro, Avelox and all the other quinolone poisons are crippling people and many doctors are woefully ignorant about these potential adverse reactions. It is unbelievable and unfortunate that this toxicity has been kept from the public’s knowledge.   

Posted in Long term damage from Quinolone antibiotics | No Comments »