Turning the phage

an article by Peter Forbes published in Eurozine [first published by New Humanist 1/2019]

The number of deaths caused globally by antibiotic resistance is increasing at alarming speed. The problem is well known, but governments and pharma appear not to take it seriously. Progress in bacteriophage research gives cause for optimism, however: using CRISPR gene editing technologies, these organisms can be deployed as an alternative to antibiotics.

In November 2015 Tom Patterson, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, was on holiday with his wife Steffanie Strathdee when he fell ill. Patterson, who is now 70, had a gallstone and a pancreatic abscess, both of which were treatable. But an infection by Acinetobacter baumannii caused a greater problem. This organism, which colonises skin wounds such as burns, became notorious for its resistance to antibiotics during the 2003 Iraq war. Patterson became comatose and increasingly skeletal; the antibiotics he was given were failing. But Strathdee is an infectious diseases epidemiologist and she knew something about bacteriophages, microscopic organisms that had been used to combat infections successfully in the Soviet Union and other parts of Eastern Europe for a century but had never been accepted by Western medicine. Bacteriophages, or “phages” as they are commonly known, were allowed only as a last resort in cases like Patterson’s.

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