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Online
Pharmacies Risky, Cleveland Study Finds
From staff and wire reports A Cleveland study has found ample evidence that online pharmacies can be as risky as the diseases they are treating. During last fall's anthrax outbreak, none of the Web sites selling the antibiotic Cipro required customers to fax or mail in a doctor's prescription. Ciprofloxacin, better known as Cipro, is given to people infected or exposed to anthrax. But last fall, thousands of frightened Americans across the country flocked to doctor's offices and the rash of online pharmacies to buy the drug even though the 22 reported cases of anthrax were largely confined to a handful of states along the East Coast. Public health officials recommended preventive antibiotics for about 10,000 people who were at high risk of being exposed to anthrax, but all got the drugs only after consulting with a health professional. The study, which appears in today's American Journal of Medicine, discovered 59 Web sites over a two-week period last October selling the antibiotic without a prescription, with 23 of the sites created in the days following the first reported case of anthrax in Florida. Forty-nine of the sites simply asked the customer to supply a brief medical history. The remaining sites didn't even require that. "The host of Web sites we identified sprouted up within two weeks of the anthrax outbreak - one outbreak immediately following the other," said Alexander Tsai, a medical student at Case Western Reserve University and lead author of the study. Almost a third of the sites gave no information about possible adverse
effects from taking Cipro, and 27 percent didn't mention the danger
of life-threatening allergic reactions for patients with a history of
sensitivity to quinolone antibiotics, the class that includes Cipro.
© 2002 The Plain Dealer. Used with permission. |