A lady who was given a common antibiotic in 2021 and became wheelchair-bound and permanently crippled is alerting people about the dangers of the medication.
In April 2021, 45-year-old Talia Smith, who was then a fitness enthusiast and an enthusiastic runner, was prescribed ciprofloxacin, or Cipro, to cure a urinary tract infection.
After three pills, she experienced severe pains that felt like an electrocution shooting up from her feet to her legs. The subsequent sensation in her body was akin to a bomb detonating.
She was unable to move because her muscles were so rigid. She claims that after visiting the hospital, the doctors advised her to take ibuprofen and sent her home.
Her ability to chew and swallow food without it being pureed was eventually compromised, as was her ability to take a solo shower. She and her spouse, a disabled veteran, are no longer able to share a home due to their complicated health demands.
More Americans came forward to share their terrifying experiences on Cipro after Smith’s story originally went viral.
Nevertheless, the medication was still prescribed to millions of Americans annually despite doctors’ warnings about its connections to a debilitating illness that damages nerves irreversibly.
However, after nearly four years, the CDC will now formally acknowledge the adverse effect that is commonly referred to as “floxing.”
Whether breathed or taken orally, fluoroquinolones can have major side effects that can be incapacitating, persistent, and even irreversible. According to estimates, at least 1 to 10 out of every 10,000 patients using these drugs experience serious negative effects.
By using her terrifying medical experience as a driving force behind campaigning, Smith and medical professionals were able to persuade the CDC to formally identify the illness as a diagnosable and reportable condition, which raised awareness of the problem and made it simpler to monitor. In July of 2024, that policy went into effect.
Dr. Stefan Pieper, who has treated about 1,500 patients with fluoroquinolone poisoning at his practice in Germany and made the suggestion to the CDC, described the official recognition from the CDC as “something like landing on the moon.”
Smith claims that when she questioned her doctor about the drug’s potency and its adverse effects, she was informed that it was safe and frequently administered.
The doctor did not, however, bring up the FDA’s Black Box warnings, the first of which was published in 2008, detailing the dangers of tendinitis, nerve damage that can result in numbness, discomfort, and tingling, seizures, tremors, and a number of other symptoms.
“I took the antibiotic,” Mrs. Smith stated. After three pills, I was unable to walk. My body began to ache in all directions. In fact, during this period, my vision transformed. I had difficulty swallowing.
Cipro belongs to a class of antibiotics called fluoroquinolones, which have a long range of potentially fatal adverse effects, ranging from aortic rips and nerve damage to tendon rupture and muscular atrophy. Approximately 15 million Americans are prescribed it annually in spite of the hazards.
One of the first things a doctor asked Mrs. Smith when she arrived at her neighborhood emergency room in Norwood, Massachusetts, was, “Are you taking Cipro?”
She discovered that many of her symptoms, including tremors, acute, shooting pains, dizziness, and muscle weakness, were present at that time, along with the FDA’s strictest warnings, known as the Black Box warnings.
After two days, she stopped taking the medication, but the harm had already been done.
Every week she grew worse.
She weighed 60 pounds and was in hospice care five months later.
“The nerve pain was ridiculous, just constant nerve pain,” she said.
She added: “And as for my life, it’s flipped upside down. I can’t even take care of myself. I’m on palliative care. I need care 24/7.”
Cipro is a fluoroquinolone antibiotic that can affect human cells, particularly nerve cells, in addition to dangerous germs.
It may disrupt how cells’ mitochondria, which control cellular repair and energy generation, operate. Nerve damage results from cell stress, which interferes with normal signaling routes.
By disrupting microscopic channels, known as ion channels, that facilitate neuron communication, it can also impact how nerves transmit messages. Unusual feelings like pain or tingling may result from this disturbance.
Since the 1980s, over 60,000 people have reported hundreds of thousands of significant adverse events linked to fluoroquinolones to the FDA.
Actor Rick Zingale, 61, of New Jersey, who portrayed Don Miguel in Rambo: Last Blood (2019), is the subject of one recent case. He was admitted to the hospital in 2022 with symptoms that the physicians initially thought were pneumonia and bronchitis.
To treat what was believed to be a bacterial lung infection, Zingale received an intravenous drip of the fluoroquinolone medication levofloxacin. He eventually discovered, however, that the antibiotics were useless since he was truly experiencing heart failure.
Unfortunately, the side effects of the medications changed his life. In addition to pain that “shoots down” his neck and right arm, he acquired a red, swollen tumor close to his right collarbone. He also thinks the medication is to blame for the development of arthritis in his right hand.
He said: “I’m defeated… because I have these horrible symptoms and I don’t know what’s going on… I’m absolutely distraught.”
Mindy Tautfest, a 44-year-old Oklahoma City resident, is also impacted.
The former intensive care unit nurse told DailyMail.com that she underwent surgery to remove her appendix in 2016.
Three weeks or so later, doctors told her that the internal stitches were infected and gave her a prescription for ciprofloxacin, commonly known as Cipro, for a week.
With her extensive experience in prescribing this drug for similar infections, Mrs. Tautfest wasn’t initially concerned. However, after starting the medication, she began feeling unusually off. “I can’t describe the weird feeling, I just didn’t feel quite right,” she explained.
She experienced a vertebral artery dissection, or rupture in the artery supplying blood to the brain, just two months after starting the medication. Sadly, it resulted in a stroke for her.
“It was like a gunshot erupted inside my head,” she said.
“I felt the back of my head and couldn’t feel any blood. That’s when I realized that it was probably some type of a brain aneurysm inside my head that had ruptured.”
“It was like peeling away—I call it an electrical avalanche—that rolled down my body. It just felt horrendous.”
John Sunderland Manousso, an 85-year-old Texas resident, is another of the many impacted. He went to his doctor in July 2023 due to a recurrent UTI.
A six-day regimen of levofloxacin was ordered by his physician. John started experiencing trouble walking just two days after starting the antibiotic.
His wife, Barbara, explained to DailyMail.com: He said to me, “I’ve got knives coming up my legs.”
“He was clearly in pain and swaying from side to side like he was on a boat.”
When the pair started looking for information online, they discovered a notice that the medication shouldn’t be administered to elderly or disabled individuals. Prior to the prescription, they had spoken with the doctor about John’s vascular parkinsonism diagnosis, which impairs movement and balance.
When they called the doctor, he promised that after John stopped taking the medication, the bad symptoms would go.
However, things deteriorated. After a few days, John’s legs had swelled to more than three times their regular size and he could “barely move.”
A few weeks later, John “screamed” when he attempted to stand up at a Newport, Rhode Island, banquet. As it happened, his right leg’s tendon had ripped.
Fluoroquinolones are known to cause tendon ruptures.
Due to “terrible pain and balance issues,” John is now unable to walk without a walker and has experienced multiple falls, including one in which he tore his rotator cuff.
Because of the potentially fatal side effects, doctors are prescribing Cipro less often than they used to.
Additionally, certain bacteria have developed resistance to Cipro as a result of overuse, making future treatments for infections brought on by such bacteria more difficult. There are better options for common ailments like lung infections and urinary tract infections.
Mrs. Smith said, “Make sure you actually need an antibiotic before taking one.”
“Antibiotics in the United States are so overprescribed and we’re very used to taking them if a doctor tells you a medication is safe. Double check, triple check, just to be sure.”
