In 2001, John Angell was working as staff director for Max Baucus (D-Mont.) in the powerful Senate Finance Committee. Like hundreds of other Senate workers, he started taking the antibiotic Cipro as a preventive measure against anthrax after letters laced with infectious spores arrived at senators’ offices.
A few days later, he felt pain in both his Achilles tendons. A week after that, the pain had grown so bad that he talked to a doctor, who switched him to another antibiotic. But the pain didn’t go away, and nearly seven years later, Angell still walks with a cane and can’t hike or play tennis the way he used to.
Like the rest of America, the Health Blog has been reading a lot about anthrax this week, but until we chatted with Angell we hadn’t thought to connect the 2001 attacks with the tendon problems the drug causes in rare cases. Indeed, Angell told us he wasn’t aware of any other Senate staffers having problems associated with Cipro.
Only last month that the FDA told makers of Cipro and other drugs in its class, known as fluoroquinolones, to add a black-box warning to flag the risk of tendinitis and tendon rupture associated with the drugs.
Bayer sells branded Cipro; the drug is also available generically as ciprofloxacin. In a statement emailed to the Health Blog, a Bayer spokesman said that “Bayer believes Cipro is well tolerated and effective in all approved indications when used in accordance with current product labeling, and that it has a positive benefit-risk profile in all approved indications.”
Angell says his problem grew so bad that he became largely immobile, and missed a lot of work. He spent a week in a rehab hospital, where he was “either in bed, in a wheelchair or in a swimming pool.” The swimming did seem to help, and he now hits the pool at least three times a week.
Missing all that work, he was unable to keep his old job, and now he serves as a senior adviser to the committee. Despite the impressive-sounding title, his new job is less senior than his role as staff director.
“I can go to work, I can swim, I can go to the grocery store,” he says. “I have a life, but I don’t have the life I used to have.”
Associated Press photo of workers outside the Hart Senate Office Building, November 2001
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