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

Alvin

Alvin

Senior Member (Voting Rights)
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This is a very long article, i've only gotten through about 20% of it so far

Strathdee’s friends knew she was desperately searching for solutions, and one told her about an acquaintance with an intractable infection who had traveled to Eastern Europe to seek out a century-old cure. Strathdee spent days reading whatever she could find about it, and now she was composing a last-ditch email to the hospital’s head of infectious diseases, the person who would rule on whether they could use it to help her spouse.

“We are running out of options to save Tom,” she wrote. “What do you think about phage therapy?”

Strathdee didn’t realize it at the time, but her attempt to save her husband’s life would test the bounds of the American medical system—and throw its limitations into stark relief.
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https://www.motherjones.com/environ...resistance-phage-therapy-bacteriophage-virus/
 
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andypants said:
Worth the long read!:)
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Allele said:
Yes, very interesting! Thanks Alvin :thumbup:
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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)
 
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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/
 
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DokaGirl said:
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/
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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!:laugh:)

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

Thank you!
 
Trying to get my head around two different phage stories.

I think we have two completely different situations with different phages.

A phage, or bacteriophage is a virus that infects only bacteria. Viruses can only multiply by entering cells of other organisms, in this case bacterial cells and hijacking the cell's functions to replicate themselves.

There are lots of different phages that infect different bacteria, so their relevance to bacterial illness will be different too.

One lot are being used as medical treatment to kill off bacterial infections.

Another lot are hypothesised to enable some bacterial infections to spread.

Have I understood this correctly?
 
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

What she accomplished next could easily be called miraculous. First, Strathdee found an obscure treatment that offered a glimmer of hope -- fighting superbugs with phages, viruses created by nature to eat bacteria.

Then she convinced phage scientists around the country to hunt and peck through molecular haystacks of sewage, bogs, ponds, the bilge of boats and other prime breeding grounds for bacteria and their viral opponents. The impossible goal: quickly find the few, exquisitely unique phages capable of fighting a specific strain of antibiotic-resistant bacteria literally eating her husband alive.

Next, the US Food and Drug Administration had to greenlight this unproven cocktail of hope, and scientists had to purify the mixture so that it wouldn't be deadly.

Yet just three weeks later, Strathdee watched doctors intravenously inject the mixture into her husband's body -- and save his life.

Her journey is one of unrelenting perseverance and unbelievable good fortune. It's a glowing tribute to the immense kindness of strangers. And it's a story that just might save countless lives from the growing threat of antibiotic-resistant superbugs -- maybe even your own.

"It's estimated that by 2050, 10 million people per year -- that's one person every three seconds -- is going to be dying from a superbug infection," Strathdee told the Life Itself audience.

"We have been caught for the last 2 1/2 years in this terrible situation where viruses have been the bad guy," she said. "I'm here to tell you that the enemy of my enemy can be my friend. Viruses can be medicine."
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Edited to add title and quote box after my thread was merged.
 
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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.
 
Leila said:
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.
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One of the things I ask nurses when I've been interning at different hospitals is if they actually are tested for MRSA (as students we have to sign that we haven't been in a location where we are likely to get it), most laugh and say the hospital don't want to know for the same reasons listed here :( And the paper we student sign? It asks if we've been admitted to a hospital in a foreign country and that's pretty much it. As if one can only contract these bugs in a hospital (at the time I had to sign this there was a woman in the newspaper that had gotten an infection at the pool by her hotel when travelling in Europe, I can't remember if she lost her foot or not but it had not been easy for her)
 
Midnattsol said:
MRSA (as students we have to sign that we haven't been in a location where we are likely to get it
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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.
 
alex3619 said:
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.
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In Norway we like to think we don't have as much of it ;) But with more travelling, including travels for surgeries to countries where antibiotic resistance is rampant in hospital settings, I think it is more common than we like to believe. We are still trying to contain it, for example if MRSA is discovered in pigs, all pigs on the farm will be put down and the farm sanitized.
 
Trish said:
A phage, or bacteriophage is a virus that infects only bacteria.
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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.
 
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