Fluoroquinolones have become one of the mainstays of antibacterial therapy, regarded as a major antimicrobial class, with efficacy against a wide range of important pathogens. And among the fluoroquinolones, levofloxacin continues to stand out as one, if not the, most important fluoroquinolone. While the history of these agents first started in 1962 with the development of nalidixic acid, it wa...

Fluoroquinolones have been reported to induce central nervous system side effects, including seizures and psychiatric events. Although relatively rare in patients up to now, the proconvulsant activity depends on the chemical structure and might be a critical endpoint of some new representatives of this valuable class of antimicrobials. The electrophysiological determination of field potentials ...

Microsporidia are a cause of emerging and opportunistic infections in humans and animals. Although two drugs are currently being used to treat microsporidiosis, concerns exist that albendazole is only selective for inhibiting some species of microsporidia that infect mammals, and fumagillin appears to have been found to be toxic. During a limited sequence survey of the Vittaforma corneae genome...

Bacterial infection of the prostate can be demonstrated by the Meares & Stamey 4-glass or the pre and post prostate massage (PPM) 2-glass test in only about 10% of men with symptoms of chronic prostatitis/chronic pelvic pain syndrome. Chronic bacterial prostatitis is mainly caused by Gram-negative uropathogens. The role of Gram-positives, such as staphylococci and enterococci, and atypicals, su...

Scrub typhus is a public health concern for a population of over a billion humans, with an estimated incidence of one million cases/year in endemic areas. Although doxycycline remains the standard therapy, fluoroquinolones have been used successfully in a few patients. However, there is also clinical evidence that fluoroquinolones are ineffective in the treatment of scrub typhus. To clarify thi...

Moxifloxacin is a C8-methoxy (C8-OMe) fluoroquinolone that is highly active against Staphylococcus aureus, including many strains resistant to older fluoroquinolones such as ciprofloxacin. Available data indicate that it is a poor substrate for the NorA multidrug efflux pump. We produced a mutant of S. aureus in vitro (SA-K2068) with a novel non-NorA-mediated multidrug resistance phenotype char...

The occurrence, removal efficiency and seasonal variation of 22 antibiotics, including eight fluoroquinolones, nine sulfonamides and five macrolides, were investigated in eight sewage treatment plants (STPs) in Beijing, China. A total of 14 antibiotics were detected in wastewater samples, with the maximum concentration being 3.1 μg L(-1) in the influent samples and 1.2 μg L(-1) in the effluent ...

In the United States, gonorrhea is the second most commonly reported notifiable disease, with 339,593 cases documented in 2005. Since 1993, fluoroquinolones (i.e., ciprofloxacin, ofloxacin, or levofloxacin) have been used frequently in the treatment of gonorrhea because of their high efficacy, ready availability, and convenience as a single-dose, oral therapy. However, prevalence of fluoroquino...

Clostridium difficile infection (CDI) was described in 1978 and soon became recognized as the main complication of antimicrobial use. In fact, one of the major risk factors associated with this infection is the use of antimicrobial agents (1). Clindamycin was the first antibiotic to be related to an increase in the incidence of CDI followed by parenteral cephalosporins, especially cefotaxime an...