“The asthma has definitely not been an issue,” said Cirves, 33.

Hahn said some asthma patients, especially those with complications such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, have remained on weekly azithromycin for about a decade or more. They include his mother-in-law, who is 96.

“She probably wouldn’t be alive if it weren’t for azithromycin,” he said.

Worries about resistance

Hahn, 68, retired from his Dean practice last year. He is now director of the Wisconsin Research and Education Network, a primary care research program that is part of the UW School of Medicine and Public Health’s Department of Family Medicine.

The new job puts him in a somewhat awkward position because he blames academic medicine’s emphasis on how things work — instead of if they work — for much of the neglect of his theory.

In the book, he explains the alleged academic bias, in part, through the story of Helicobacter pylori, another bacteria.

In the 1980s, Hahn writes, the biomedical community quickly accepted the theory that H. pylori could cause ulcers because it could be easily sampled from patients and grown in the lab.