I was reading about bacteriophage therapy (phage therapy) and will confess I ended up horrified by our American attitude of near-total dismissiveness towards this amazing and proven “last line of defense” medical therapy so effective at killing the antibiotic-resistant bacteria now killing us.
What is phage therapy? In brief, it’s using the viruses which destroy bacteria to kill bacteria which are sickening or killing us. It’s the old scenario: the enemy of my enemy is my friend. You might recoil in horror at the idea of someone introducing live virus into your system. That’s a needless worry. These viruses go in and destroy harmful bacteria and then die off as soon as their bacterial “assembly stations” die off. This is a targeted therapy. Unlike antibiotics, they don’t kill off the good bacteria you want in your body.
Most projections now show that deaths from antibiotic-resistant bacteria will outstrip deaths by cancer sometime around the year 2050. One would assume that in a rational world this predicted outcome will be altered by our awareness of it.
Phage therapy is one thing that could alter that outcome. Medical research is now going so fast that it might be a completely different therapeutic approach which solves this growing problem of resistant bacteria. Even people seriously invested in this problem rarely want to address what’s probably more than half of the problem: animal “agriculture” and its horrors. Even the great viral plagues often get their start there.It’s not just the longstanding abuse of antibiotics by the industry which is producing killer microbial entities. It’s the nature of the torture-based “industry” itself. Call it microbiological karma. Nothing reminds me more of how needlessly disgusting we are as a species than pointless cruelty and nowhere does it happen on such a scale (even the bone-chilling atrocities we commit against each other are statistically minuscule in comparison) as in our “animal agriculture” (a pallid euphemism for animal torture). People don’t want to hear it, because change is challenging. But an ethical and compassionate diet would pay dividends for the planet and would reduce the planetary epidemiological load. If you study the history of epidemics, especially modern ones, this is undeniable.
The history of phage therapy is fascinating. In the early part of the twentieth century, it was poised to be the predominant therapy in the treatment of bacterial disease. And then Fleming had that serendipitous discovery of penicillin and history shifted. We put all our eggs in one basket. Phage therapy was used in the former Soviet Union and until recently the only institutions that practiced it were located in three countries that were formerly behind the Iron Curtain. Now America has its first institution dedicated to phage therapy, at the University of California, San Diego. Way to go, UCSD. We need more of this.
If you read even a little about phage therapy, you will quickly learn that chief among the several reasons it is not currently a part of American medicine is the issue with obtaining patents. Patenting biological entities like bacteriophages is not always so easy or inexpensive, and pharmaceutical companies want that monopolistic leverage for profit. So as the ongoing arguments about how “socialist” we want our medicine to be are hashed out, many people die needlessly, since this last line of defense against antibiotic-resistant organisms is simply not there for them. Did you catch this story about phage therapy saving a man’s life? This could be happening all the time. This eleventh hour salvation could be readily available. Phage therapy is not some weird, woo-based medicine. It’s practical medicine that works beautifully when practiced knowledgeably.
I would argue that it is the American government’s responsibility to figure out how to negotiate the pitfalls and financial challenges that stand in the way of American medicine implementing this therapy in a wide-scale and lasting way. The simple fact is it comes down to money before medicine right now. This should surprise no one in America. The pharmaceutical industry is only too happy to produce over-prescribed antibiotics which have significant negative side effects rather than focus on targeted therapies like phage which do not have those negative side effects. But that’s just money. They’re in the business of making money, not the business of attending to citizen welfare. I would expect that latter mission to be part of our government’s oversight. I would expect the government and the medical establishment to use their ingenuity to find ways to make phage therapy a reality and to make it a profitable industry at the same time. It can’t be impossible.
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