Fluoroquinolones

What do such drugs treat, why does the government want to issue labelling changes?

• On Thursday, It was reported that the Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation (CDSCO) is likely to issue changes in labelling for “fluoroquinolones”, a class of antibiotic drugs.
• Fluoroquinolones are approved for the treatment or prevention of certain bacterial infections but, like other antibacterial drugs, they do not treat viral infections such as colds or flu.

Why?

• The labeling changes require that mental health side effects be listed separately from other central nervous system side effects, and that they be consistent across the labeling of all drugs in the class.
• Specific side effects to be included in the labeling are disturbances in attention, disorientation, agitation, nervousness, memory impairment and delirium.
• In addition, the blood glucose disturbances subsection of the labeling for all systemic fluoroquinolones will be required to explicitly reflect the potential risk of hypoglycemic coma, particularly in older patients and in patients with diabetes who are taking other drugs to reduce blood glucose levels.

Earthquake swarms

• Earthquake swarms are generally defined as a sequence of events closely clustered in time and space without a single outstanding shock.
• Earthquake swarms are events where a local area experiences sequences of many earthquakes striking in a relatively short period of time.
• The length of time used to define the swarm itself varies, but may be of the order of days, weeks, or months.
• They are differentiated from earthquakes succeeded by a series of aftershocks by the observation that no single earthquake in the sequence is obviously the main shock.