Today April 27 has been declared the Day of Human Phage therapy.
But what are bacteriophages?
Bacteriophages are viruses such as influenza, measles, polio and other diseases caused by viruses, but these are special, because instead of infecting or damaging human cells, they infect and kill only bacteria. As the saying goes, "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" if a patient suffers from an infection caused by bacteria, they can be given phages, which would kill those bacteria, but without harming the patient's cells.
What happened then?
In 1929 Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin, which started the revolution of antibiotics, medicines considered "miraculous”. In the following decades, dozens of antibiotics were discovered and practically everyone forgot the phages.
But not everything is good for phages, the problem is that these are specific, a phage is capable of infecting only a specific type of bacteria depending on their species and strain. Then to give a correct Phage therapy first we must identify exactly the bacteria responsible for the disease and that is not always easy.
Instead an antibiotic is capable of killing many types of bacteria, there are even antibiotics that are called "broad spectrum". As 100 years ago humans did not have good diagnostic techniques in laboratories, it was much easier to give an antibiotic which would kill the bacteria without even knowing which was specifically.
But we made a serious mistake!
We started using antibiotics to ALL, infections that are not bacterial, prolonging the treatments unnecessarily, we even give antibiotics to the cows to "prevent" diseases and grow even more.
As expected, the bacteria began to evolve and acquired mechanisms to become resistant to antibiotics, resulting in super bacteria, therefore we need new strategies to cure these infections.
That is why it is necessary to return to the interest in Phage therapy in the world!
There are many questions to answer, have to know in depth its mechanism of action, assess its safety, dose, route of administration, interactions with the body and other treatments, emergence of resistance among other aspects.
But there are already reports of patients whose lives have been saved thanks to the experimental use of phagotherapy, here I leave a report of the magazine TIME which talks about two of these patients. Click aqui
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