For all the reasons cited, for maybe so they can diss Bayer after they beat them up??

http://www.boston.com/news/daily/29/antibiotics.htm

U.S. goverment to use older drug to combat anthrax

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent, Reuters, 10/29/01

WASHINGTON -- U.S. health officials said Monday they would start leaning away from the antibiotic Cipro as the first-line treatment to prevent anthrax infection and use more of the older drug doxycycline.

They said in cases so far the anthrax that has infected people is easily killed by the older, less expensive antibiotic, so they can save the newer Cipro for when it is really needed.

Tens of thousands of Americans who may have been exposed to anthrax are now taking antibiotics, Dr. Bradley Perkins, an anthrax expert at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said.

"We consider doxycycline as a better choice in the current situation where we have tens of thousands of people on that drug," Perkins told reporters in a telephone briefing. "There are important public health implications of having that large a number of people on antibiotics."

Ciprofloxacin, made by German drugmaker Bayer under the brand-name Cipro, is one of the newer antibiotics in a class known as floroquinolones and is favored for first use against infections when it is not known whether the bacteria involved may resist other drugs.

But health officials have stressed that the current known anthrax infections have responded to several drugs, including penicillin and doxycycline.

This is good news, because older drugs are cheaper, more widely available and their side-effects are better understood. Doxycycline is in a class of drugs known as tetracyclines. Anthrax can also be killed by penicillin and related drugs.

Cipro is the first drug of choice when little is known about an infection, Perkins said. The newer the drug, the less likely that bacteria have evolved resistance to it.

Cipro is given to patients when they have pneumonia, gastrointestinal or urinary tract infections and doctors do not know which bacteria caused the infection.

WORRIES ABOUT MUTATED BACTERIA

Perkins said the worry is that if people take Cipro for the recommended 60 days, the drug may not work as well if they have another infection and need the Cipro.

"For that reason we are moving more strongly to the use of doxycycline in this particular situation where we know that the strains that we been dealing with are as susceptible to doxycycline," Perkins said.

That is the way the national stockpile of drugs is designed, Perkins added. The CDC brings out its strongest weapon first, just to be safe, and then moves to others if it turns out they would be just as useful.

"In this situation we have information about the susceptibility of the organisms that we have seen to date and ... given the number of people that are currently on treatment, it would be a reasonable and at this point perhaps a preferred way to start."

This would not hold, Perkins added, if a new infection from a new source should arise.

Bayer said Monday it expected the United States to honor an agreement to recommend use of Cipro in the early stages of anthrax treatment.

Bayer agreed last week to supply the U.S. government with 100 million tablets of Cipro at a steep discount of 95 cents per tablet. That is still double the over-the-counter price of doxycycline, which normally sells for between 45 cents and 50 cents each in drugstores.

Miami-based generic drugmaker Ivax Corp. said Friday it would supply the U.S. government with more than 1.2 billion doxycycline tablets.

Health officials have urged Americans not to keep their own supplies of antibiotics or take them without a doctor's order. Antibiotics have a wide range of side-effects, from rashes and nausea to, in the case of Cipro, a weakening of the ligaments.

And the more often an antibiotic is used, the more resistant bacteria become to it, eventually making the drug useless.

-- Anonymous, October 29, 2001