https://health.howstuffworks.com/medicine/modern-treatments/could-phage-therapy-fight-superbugs.htm
Phage to the Rescue?
Meet bacteriophage, or phage for short. Discovered in 1917 by microbiologist Felix d’Herelle, could this almost forgotten, century-old Soviet-era medical treatment be our last-ditch hope against the onslaught of chronic, drug-resistant infections?
As David S. Weiss, Ph.D., director of the antibiotic resistance center at Emory University, explains, “Phages are viruses that infect and kill bacteria. When administered to a patient, the phages track down and kill the bacteria-causing disease, allowing the patient to recover.”
To grasp how phage therapy works, it’s essential to understand the difference between bacteria and viruses. The majority of drug-resistant superbugs that create medical mayhem are bacterial. Bacteria are microscopic single-celled organisms that exist to feed, metabolize and ceaselessly reproduce. Viruses, which are much smaller than bacteria, live solely to reproduce. A virus attaches to a cell, commandeers its reproductive apparatus and then blasts the cell, allowing viral copies to float free.
Think of viruses as tireless, meticulous sanitation workers that stop bacteria from consuming the planet. Think of each individual phage (and there are trillions of them in the world) as a discriminating assassin that is evolutionarily tuned to kill only one specific bacteria. This targeted attack and annihilation of lethal, multidrug-resistant bacteria (that in no way harms the sick patient) is the crux of the potential hope for phage therapy as a do-or-die treatment.
PHAGElogist 