No antibiotics worked, so this woman turned to a natural enemy of bacteria to save her husband's life, 2022, LaMotte

Merged thread
This is a very long article, i've only gotten through about 20% of it so far

https://www.motherjones.com/environ...resistance-phage-therapy-bacteriophage-virus/

 

Worth the long read!

 

Yes, very interesting! Thanks Alvin

 

Thanks, i'm mentally in bad shape right now, might be next week before i actually get through reading it, my backlog is ginormous and includes more important matters beyond reading articles and have high priority (doctor's appts, arranging transportation, making decisions, fixing a few broken things at home and so forth)

 

Montreal conference casualty. You are not alone.

 

More has happened since, i sometimes worry if i completely lose my ability to think i'm screwed
When i get more acetyl carnitine tablets delivered i will be raising the dose again

 

Merged thread

This is an opinion piece written by Dr. Steffanie Strathdee," infectious-disease epidemiologist, and associate dean of global health sciences and professor at the University of California, San Diego, school of medicine. She also directs the new UC San Diego Center for Innovative Phage Application and Therapeutics and is an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins and Simon Fraser Univeristies. She is the co-author of The Perfect Predator: A Scientist's Race to Save Her Husband from a Deadly Superbug."


https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opi...revive-a-forgotten-cure-to-combat-the-global/

 

see also this thread:
https://www.s4me.info/threads/virus...stem-into-ignoring-bacterial-infections.8810/

 

Thank you @Sly Saint.

I did note the other thread. While these articles are both talking about phages, I thought the link you posted was talking about phages letting bacterial infections run rampant, and therefore harming people, which appears to contradict this article; rather confusing.

I thought a separate post would be better. But, maybe I misunderstood the meaning of the first post.

(That's never happened before - ha!)

If the moderators would like to move this post please do so.

Thank you!

 

Thank you @Trish for your comments. I hope someone more sciency than me can decide whether these are two separate ways phages behave.

My understanding is these two articles are about different ways phages work.

But I don't know if I've understood correctly.

I was going to add this article to @Andy's post, but thought that would be confusing, as it seems to contradict the first article. I kept meaning to post the Canadian newspaper article earlier, as it's from March 1st, but was only reminded with @Andy's post. Sorry for the muddle. Maybe they should be posted together anyways.

Thanks again for your post.

 

Merged thread

No antibiotics worked, so this woman turned to a natural enemy of bacteria to save her husband's life, 2022, LaMotte

https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/08/health/phage-superbug-killer-life-itself-wellness/index.html

Edited to add title and quote box after my thread was merged.

 

The Perfect Predator: A Scientist's Race to Save Her Husband from a Deadly Superbug: A Memoir

 

My father died of a nosocomial superbug (3MRGN) he caught after heart surgery.

I researched superbugs back then and looked into phage therapy, there was no chance here in Germany to get it (I contacted a somewhat fishy organization but it didn't seem safe. As well as a heart surgeon that had written about phage therapy).

Aside from ME itself superbugs are the biggest medical nightmare for me at a hospital. And I can't understand why there isn't been done more to prevent infection as well as researching for treatments, e.g. phage therapy.

When I used to live in the very west of Germany, I would always get tested for MRSA at the hospital before they would let me stay. I asked why and they told be they adopted that from the Netherlands. Asking why that isn't being done everywherey I was told hospitals usually just don't want to know if you have it because then they'd have to isolate you. They don't have room or staff for that.

The idea that previously easy to treat bacterial infections in the future might be incurable is setting us back a century.

 

You mean anywhere with people? Its everywhere now. If I recall correctly a decade ago half of all medical staff were carriers. One third in the general population. Not sure where this data was collated, might vary in different parts of the world.

Phage therapy is most of a century old. However I am not sure that phages were carefully preselected to target specific bacteria in most of the studies, I don't think they were. That is the advance. Old one phage fits all therapy did not work too well except in a small minority of cases from what I had read some time back.

 

Twenty odd years ago I asked if ME patients have been tested for gut phages at an ME medical conference. Nobody thought it was important. If gut bacteria are infected but survive then they might function differently. The mitochondria are also very much like bacteria, and so potentially susceptible, but its hard to see how a phage might enter a cell by itself. Possibly only by riding with an intracellular pathogen. To date I don't think this issue has been investigated.

 

I saw a BBC programme maybe 25 years ago, warning that almost 100 years of Georgia's research into bacteriophages was at risk due to power outages and unreliable storage equipment in the aftermath of the civil war. It prompted something of a rescue effort, and the research facility and at least some of the original materials were saved.

Phage treatments still seem to be a niche idea in the west, but I think they used to be fairly common in the Soviet bloc. I remember being treated with phages in Moscow for a nasty foot infection in the early 80s—it was in the form of a liquid that I had to use to clean the skin and the put on the dressings. No idea of the wider potential of the approach, obviously, but given that antibiotics seem destined to be a busted flush due to decades of industrial misuse, we do need something to replace them.