Phage Therapy
Food Chain Radio Show #1221
Michael Olson, Author & Urban Farming Agriculturalist
Phage Therapy
Guest: Dr. Steffanie Strathdee, PhD, Associate Dean of Global Health Sciences and Professor of Medicine, Co-Director of the Center for Innovative Phage Applications and Therapeutics UCSD and Author of The Perfect Predator
Talk about a good thing! The discovery of antibiotics enabled us to beat back bacteria and survive what had been debilitating and fatal diseases. Antibiotics proved to be such a good thing we began to use them indiscriminately
Michael Olson Food Chain Radio – SuperBugs and Phage Therapy • Photo Illustration: MIT Technology Review
and prophylactically.
For example, we now feed the animals we eat somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 million pounds of antibiotics every year to help them survive the industrial settings of modern animal factories. And we use them on ourselves to treat maladies for which they have no effect, like the viruses of colds and influenza.
Given the extent to which we use antibiotics, some of the bacteria we tried to discourage developed a resistance and became… Superbugs! Today an estimated one million of us are infected every year by antibiotic resistant superbugs.
However, there may be hope in a treatment using a cocktail of phages, which are viruses that solely attack and kill bacteria. And because antibiotic resistance is a growing emergency, can phage therapy provide potential treatments of antibiotic-resistant superbugs?
Leave a comment below: How can we resist the antibiotic resistant superbugs?
Nationally syndicated Food Chain Radio airs live Saturday mornings 9-10AM Pacific.
