Moxifloxacin, sold under the brand name Avelox, can have very dangerous fluoroquinolone side effects. Recent medical research links use of Avelox to severe ocular (eye) injuries, including uveitis, glaucoma, and even irreversible vision loss.

What is Avelox?

Avelox is a broad-spectrum fluoroquinolone antibiotic medication that is promoted as a treatment for common bronchitis, sinusitis infections, and acquired pneumonia. This quinolone drug is available in a tablet form and as an intravenous (IV) injection, which is for use in a hospital setting only. Avelox functions by disrupting DNA replication and cell division within bacteria. However, Avelox is only prescribed in limited circumstances after other antibiotic treatments have failed. The reason Avelox is a drug of last resort is because it can interact badly with other drugs and even herbal supplements.

Avelox is manufactured by Bayer Healthcare Pharmaceuticals Inc. and marketed by Merck. Bayer first patented Avelox in 1991, but it took the FDA another eight years to approve the drug as an antibiotic treatment. Bayer intended Avelox to replace another well-known quinolone antibiotic known as ciprofloxacin (or Cipro). Avelox can be administered in three ways, though the most common form of Avelox is given in oral tablets containing 400mg of moxifloxacin. This fluoroquinolone antibiotic can also be given in intravenous injection of 400mg moxifloxacin in 0.8 percent saline solution. Finally, Avelox can be administered in eye drops containing 5mg/mL of moxifloxacin. Due to its limited uses, Avelox can only be prescribed for chronic bronchitis, sinusitis, pneumonia, and certain specific skin conditions.

However, even with its limited uses, it has been reported that Avelox side effects may cause blindness and other serious eye injuries.

Avelox Eye Injuries

A 2012 quinolone side effects study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association actually linked Avelox use to uveitis, a serious eye disease that causes swelling and irritation in a patient’s eye, specifically in the middle layer of the eye that supplies most of the blood to the retina.

Symptoms of Avelox uveitis include:

• Blurry vision
• Dark, floating spots in vision
• Eye pain
• Redness of the eye
• Sensitivity to light

Researchers from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada analyzed health records on nearly 150,000 men between the ages of 40-85, including over 13,300 who were diagnosed with uveitis during follow-ups between 2001-2011. The researchers concluded that current first-time users of Avelox were nearly three times as likely to be diagnosed with uveitis compared to non-users.

Besides uveitis, Avelox side effects can cause a variety of other eye injuries, typically characterized by extreme sensitivity to light. Those eye conditions include:

• Iritis (painful inflammation of the iris)
• Acute pigment dispersion syndrome (APDS)
• Iris transillumination
• Iris hypopigmentation
• Pigmentary glaucoma
• Cornea perforations
• Retinal detachment

Avelox Lawsuits

Bayer’s Avelox sales revenue in 2007 was approximately $697.3 million worldwide, and the drug still brings Bayer roughly $500 million per year. However, since the fluoroquinolone drug entered the market, controversies have eroded consumer confidence in Avelox. In July 2008, the FDA placed a “black box” warning, the agency’s most serious alert, on Avelox. Despite this black box warning, there are no known efforts to effect an Avelox recall or to ban the drug all together.

In recent years, quinolone lawsuits have been filed against Bayer, the company that manufactures Avelox. Many of the Avelox lawsuits filed against Bayer center on the company’s failure to warn users of the potential risks of vision problems the drug presents to a patient’s eyesight.