Z pack for cough and sore throat

Side Effects

What are the side effects of Azithromycin (Zithromax)?

Get emergency medical help if you have signs of an allergic reaction (hives, difficult breathing, swelling in your face or throat) or a severe skin reaction (fever, sore throat, burning in your eyes, skin pain, red or purple skin rash that spreads and causes blistering and peeling).

Seek medical treatment if you have a serious drug reaction that can affect many parts of your body. Symptoms may include: skin rash, fever, swollen glands, muscle aches, severe weakness, unusual bruising, or yellowing of your skin or eyes.

Call your doctor at once if you have:

• severe stomach pain, diarrhea that is watery or bloody;
• fast or pounding heartbeats, fluttering in your chest, shortness of breath, and sudden dizziness (like you might pass out); or
• liver problems--nausea, vomiting, loss of appetite, stomach pain (upper right side), tiredness, itching, dark urine, clay-colored stools, jaundice (yellowing of the skin or eyes);

Call your doctor right away if a baby taking azithromycin becomes irritable or vomits while eating or nursing.

Older adults may be more likely to have side effects on heart rhythm, including a life-threatening fast heart rate.

Common side effects may include:

• nausea, vomiting; or
• stomach pain.

This is not a complete list of side effects and others may occur. Call your doctor for medical advice about side effects. You may report side effects to FDA at 1-800-FDA-1088.

Like many kids, I was plagued with regular strep throat infections. And, like some kids, my penicillin allergy prevented me from taking the first-line antibiotics to treat those illnesses. So, like many—probably too many—kids and adults, I got Z-Pack antibiotics. Now, decades later, I’m sad to say that basically never happens.

Unlike other antibiotics that were usually difficult for me to take as a kid and required multiple doses a day for 10 days or more, Z-Packs only required a breezy five-day course of small, often pink pills. When I got a Z-Pack, I wasn't exactly happy, but I felt like the end to my misery was just a few days away. It was a solution—and I knew relief would come relatively quickly.

Z-Pack antibiotics, we were told, were safe and effective at treating approximately a billion different conditions. So, what happened to Z-Packs? And why am I stuck with long, boring courses of other antibiotics these days instead? As it turns out, there are some pretty good reasons.

Wait, remind me what Z-Packs are?

A Z-Pack (also called a Z-Pak, Zmax, or Zithromax) is literally just azithromycin, a standard antibiotic introduced in 1992, formulated in a package of six pills, which are taken over five days.

That short time commitment was a huge part of their appeal. Other antibiotics may require multiple doses a day for 10 or 14 days at a time, Tara Vijayan, M.D., assistant clinical professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, tells SELF. “The Z-Pack was a nice defined course and relatively short,” she says. “It made people feel like they can do this; they can complete their course and they’ll be done with it.”

Plus, the ones I took were usually hot pink and came in a blister pack rather than a bottle—factors that mattered a lot to a sick and miserable 8-year-old me. They were “cheap, easy, cute, and they had a little marketing zing,” Neha Vyas, M.D., a family medicine physician at Cleveland Clinic, tells SELF.

And, Dr. Vyas says, they’re indicated for a bunch of different health issues (including skin infections, sinus infections, pharyngitis, and gonorrhea), which made them an appealing option when the first-line treatments weren’t available. For instance, before azithromycin, if you had a penicillin allergy and needed an antibiotic for a case of strep throat, your only option was likely a cephalosporin antibiotic, which still has some cross-reactivity with penicillin allergies, Dr. Vyas explains. So, if there were any worries about allergies, a Z-Pack was an obvious, nearly all-purpose choice.

So, what happened to Z-Packs?

To be clear, nothing really happened to Z-Packs specifically, Dr. Vyas says. They’re still around and still frequently prescribed to treat a few specific conditions. But lots of things happened around Z-Packs over the last several years that made doctors realize that their prescribing practices weren’t quite right.

In fact, in many ways, the rise and fall of the Z-Pack is simply a reflection of the way our understanding of antibiotics as a whole has developed in the past decade. We now know so much more about which antibiotics are best used for which illnesses, how the overuse (and misuse) of antibiotics contributes to antibiotic resistance, and the what the optimal time course is for various antibiotics. All of this resulted in Z-Packs becoming a bit less unique and less suited for some common illnesses.

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