Coroner reiterates antibiotic warning

A coroner has issued a second warning about prescribing a popular antibiotic to patients already on cholesterol-lowering drugs after details of another death caused by a rare but potentially fatal interaction between them emerged yesterday.

Cork City coroner Myra Cullinane issued recommendations in 2008 that called for a review of the co-prescribing of the antibiotic Fucidin to patients on statin therapy after evidence the drugs could react to cause the potentially fatal muscle-wasting disease rhabdomyolosis.

The interaction was linked at that time to six other deaths, three of them in Ireland. Follow-up studies by Irish experts who gave evidence at that inquest on the interaction were published internationally. National guidelines were published in Britain in 2012 urging doctors to avoid co-prescribing the two.