The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has strengthened warnings for the fluoroquinolone class of antibiotics. This comes in the wake of findings indicating that this class of antibiotics can cause mental health problems and serious blood sugar disturbances including hypoglycemic coma in people with diabetes. The fluoroquinolone class is among the most widely used in India, where hundreds of generic versions of the drugs are available.
The new safety warnings are for all fluoroquinolones, including those taken by mouth or injected. India is the world’s largest consumer of antibiotics, with use more than doubling between 2000 and 2015. Against a global antibiotic increase of 65%, India reported a 103 per cent increase, according to a study at Princeton University published in March this year.
Speaking about this, Dr KK Aggarwal, President, HCFI, said: “Antibiotics are only effective against bacterial infections. Several studies have corroborated the adverse impact of antibiotic overuse on health. Misuse and overuse of antibiotics have made once easily treatable bacterial infections harder and often impossible to cure because bacteria evolve rapidly to evade antibiotics, leading to drug resistance. This phenomenon is on the rise not only because of inappropriate use in human medicine but also due to practices in agricultural industry.”
Twenty-four potent antibiotics are included in India’s Schedule H1 of the Drugs & Cosmetic Rules that make it mandatory for the medicines to have red-line labelling and for the pharmacist to keep a separate register with the name and address of the prescriber, patient’s name, the name of the drug and the quantity supplied.