Defeating Bacteria From the Inside Out - Miller-McCune
Bacteriophages, a class of viruses that only attack bacteria, have been controversial ever since their discovery by a brash, young, self-taught researcher named Felix d’Herelle nearly a century ago.
In the 1920s and ’30s, before the advent of antibiotics, doctors using phage therapy reported near miraculous cures for infections, even at the critical stage. The treatments, however, didn’t work in every case, and after the discovery of much more reliable antibiotics, starting with penicillin in the 1940s, phage therapy was ushered off the medical stage in the United States and Western Europe.
Anna Kuchment, an editor at Scientific American, labeled phage therapy The Forgotten Cure in her recent book, in which she says the practice took up residence behind the Iron Curtain where antibiotics were scarce.
Alexander Sulakvelidze, who grew up in Tbilisi, Georgia, says phage therapy was there for him when he was a child. “Everybody took them when they got sick. It was just something you did.”
Although we now take penicillin and its host of antibiotic descendants for granted, scientists say with the emergence of more strains of antibiotic-resistant disease, it may be just a matter of time before we are forced to seek some alternatives, and researchers suggest that phage therapy may be just the ticket. And since the end of the Cold War, word has been trickling out that phage therapy still works.