Two Turkish chemists prescribed penicillin antibiotics without inquiring about any history of allergy, and one Egyptian pharmacy sold a cough suppressant containing oxeladine, a substance banned in many countries over fears that it might cause cancer.

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Penicillin and Cipro are the antibiotics used to treat the disease.

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Infectious disease experts consider them to be an antibiotic of last resort, to be prescribed only when first-line antibiotics such as penicillin fail to work, or in cases of extreme, life-threatening infection, or for certain bacteria known to respond best to quinolones.

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For instance, shortly after joining the WTO Beijing decided to target antibiotics as a growth sector and invested vast sums in building penicillin fermenters.

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The reasoning: If bacteria become resistant to current antibiotics, then bacterial infections will be as deadly as they were before the advent of penicillin.

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Some bacteria had already become resistant to penicillin by the mid-1940s, but it wasn't a big problem because so many new antibiotics were emerging from the lab.

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The researchers associated increases in multidrug-resistant MRSA in the hospital with excessive use of two specific classes of antibiotics often prescribed to treat pneumonia (fluoroquinolones) and offered as a substitute for patients allergic to penicillin (macrolides).

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