US advocacy group Public Citizen has sent a petition to the Food and Drug Administration calling on the agency to place a black box warning on an antibiotic used to treat a wide range of infections because of a higher mortality rate associated with taking the drug than other widely used antibiotics, Public Citizen said in a petition sent today to the agency. The antibiotic, drug giant Pfizer’s (NYSE: PFE) Tygacil (tigecycline) was approved by the FDA in 2005 to treat complicated skin infections and intra-abdominal infections and in 2009 to treat community-acquired pneumonia.
