Allergic reactions to some antibiotics.

When taking a certain medication, particularly for the first time, it would be hard to tell whether you will get an allergic reaction to it or not. But once you have taken that medication and you have a severe allergic reaction to it, it becomes a precaution for you to stay away from that class of medication for future circumstances. That is why it is important to inform health professionals about what allergies you have, so as to avoid them giving you a certain class of medication that could cause that allergic reaction in you. As some antibiotics also have cross reactivity (just for information's sake, penicillins and cephalosporins have a 10% cross reactivity chance), and cross reactivity basically means that if you have an allergic reaction to one class of antibiotics, you have a 10% chance of still getting the allergic reaction if you take the mentioned different class of antibiotics. This is another plus point on why you should tell any health professional you deal with about any allergies that you have.

I guess the take away point from my advice is to always inform your doctor or pharmacist about the specific antibiotics (or medications in general) that you are allergic to, so that they can ensure that you don't get another different antibiotic but is still in the same antibiotic class. Alternatively, you could also take the initiative to learn more about the classes of antibiotics and the particular antibiotics that are in each class. Just to name a few classes of antibiotics, there are penicillins, cephalosporins, macrolides, tetracyclines, aminoglycosides, quinolones, carbapenems, imidazoles, glycopeptides and lincosamides. If you can differentiate each antibiotic into it's classes, you will know what antibiotics to avoid if you have allergy to a certain antibiotic class.

Good luck, and I hope what I mentioned is understandable and didn't contain too many jargons!

Ya I too have alergic reaction to sulpha medicine. It cause blisters on my lips.

I am highly allergic to penacillin! I have to remind the doctors whenever they prescribe me antibiotics NOT to give me penacillin based drugs, they should know and have it on their screen, but it's amazing the amount of times they don't check and I have to tell them. Taking penacillin gives me a terrible rash all over my body and it's itchy too! Sometimes you feel like a guinea pig when you take antibiotics and the allergy can actually be worst than what you originally went to see the GP for!