For related articles and more information, please visit OCA’s Health Issues page and our Food Safety Research Center page.

Azithromycin (Zithromax) is a macrolide antibiotic used in the treatment of bronchitis, pneumonia, ear infections, and sexually transmitted diseases. It’s known for having unpleasant side effects such as skin rashes, itching, allergic or anaphylactic reactions, and severe, watery diarrhea.

 But it’s also associated with more severe side effects, such as myopathy-muscle and tendon pain, weakness and cramping-when taken in combination with statins. And previous research has shown that use of any type of antibiotic increases the risk of breast cancer in women.

 Most recently, research published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that azithromycin increases your chances of dying from a cardiovascular event by a whopping 250 percent within the first five days of usage, compared to those who took amoxicillin. This is nearly the same as that for Vioxx, which killed 60,000 people and was voluntarily removed from the market nearly eight years ago.

 When researchers looked at people who already had heart problems, their risk of dying while on this drug were even higher. The risk of cardiovascular death was also significantly greater with azithromycin than with ciprofloxacin, while levofloxacin and azithromycin had comparable risks of cardiovascular death.