Fluoroquinolones can cause potentially permanent damage; Anvisa issued an alert, but there is still too much prescription.
In 2018, 34-year-old Rio de Janeiro teacher Simone Avellar began to feel inexplicably tired and with a lot of muscle weakness. The alert sounded when he went to the cinema and he couldn’t bear to climb the stairs to get to his seat. She was already limping on her left leg and having difficulty walking when she saw a neurologist.
Simone was hospitalized for a week to do tests. Among the suspicions were myasthenia gravis, multiple sclerosis and cancer. But the countless tests, including a muscle biopsy that left her with a four-centimeter scar on her left thigh, revealed nothing unusual. The debilitating symptoms disappeared spontaneously about four months later, without doctors finding the cause.
Read more in Folha de S.Paulo.