The New Yorker: When a Virus is the Cure

By Nicola Twilley

    Antibiotic resistance is a growing problem around the world. In fact, the creator of penicillin, Alexander Fleming, predicted that people would take the wrong doses of the new medicine and make bacteria resistant to it. And he was right. It was actually beginning to occur within his own lifetime.

"In 2016, the United Nations pronounced antibiotic resistance 'the greatest and most urgent global risk.' Without reliable antibiotics, even relatively routine surgery—Cesarean sections, hernia repair, appendix or tonsil removal—could be deadly."

    Millions of people today are dying from antibiotic resistance because the drugs that doctors prescribe aren't working. But a new solution is bacteriophages. They are a type of virus, but they do not infect humans, like more well-known types of viruses. Instead, they attack bacteria - hence the name. 

"...scientists estimate that phages cause a trillion trillion infections per second, destroying half the world’s bacteria every forty-eight hours."

    Until recently, phages have been seen in the West as a rather shady practice. Part of this is due to the timeframe of its discovery. Félix d'Hérelle discovered phages in 1917 but recklessly claimed that they, not antibodies, were the center of the human immune system. Phages are also too small to be seen, and even with modern microscopes, few scientists have actually seen them up close. Then, because d'Hérell was a communist sympathizer, phages became synonymous with the Soviets in the Cold War era, all but erasing their presence in the West. 

    In 2015, Steffanie Strathdee's husband, Tom Patterson, got infected with drug-resistant bacteria while traveling in Egypt. After scores of treatments, his doctor Robert Schooley said there was nothing more that could be done. Luckily, Strathdee was an infectious-disease expert and she found research on bacteriophages. Phages are normally found with waste because that's where the bacteria are, so she and Schooley purified some sewage water to get some phages. Because each individual is a different case, they had to test the phages on the bacteria in Patterson. Once they found a strain that worked, they injected it, and Patterson came out of coma.

    After the results were published, requests started coming from lots of people to help save their relatives. Phages are still not officially approved by the FDA, so each case has to be individually vetted by a board from the hospital and the FDA. Each person also has to have phages tested on their strain of bacteria, and the treatment has failed in some people due to unknown reasons. That's because it's hard to have large scale clinical trials for this kind of thing.

 "'We try to help everyone, but we really need clinical trials to figure out why in some cases it just doesn’t work.'"