Today, 17 million worldwide deaths annually are caused by microbial infections. Hospital-acquired infections and multi-resistant pathogens, which until recently were familiar only to experts, are today topics of the public press. In Germany alone, 20,000 people die annually of hospital infections. The number of Canadian victims may be as high as 12,000 annually.
The prospects for the future are even gloomier. While it took approximately 50 years for 95 percent of Staphylococcus aureus strains to become resistant to penicillin, today certain problem bacteria need only a few years to acquire resistance, even to totally new classes of antibiotics.
New hope is promised by a therapy that is substantially older than penicillin—treatment with bacteriophages. On August 2, 1919, their discoverer, the French Canadian Felix d'Herelle, administered a cloudy broth containing Shigella phages to a deathly ill boy at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, curing him of dysentery. After an early worldwide boom, this therapy today essentially exists only in some Eastern European countries, including Georgia and Poland. However, it is now receiving renewed attention in the West.
This paradigm shift is the background for the unusually well-researched, outstandingly well-written and scientifically based book Viruses vs. Superbugs by the Swiss journalist Thomas Häusler. In it the author, who is also trained in biochemistry, describes all aspects, from the beginnings to the present, of a concept called bacteriophage therapy.
Bacteriophages are actually viruses highly specialized to attack bacterial cells while doing no harm to animal cells. When a phage discovers a bacterium to which it possesses the correct key—that is, suitable receptors on the bacterial cell to which the phage can attach its tentacle-like extensions—then the phage will inject its hereditary DNA into the bacteria cell. Taking over the bacterial cell's biochemical apparatus, the phage produces hundreds of phage copies, rupturing the cell. As the victim cell dies, the released phage copies attack any remaining bacterial cells like a pack of hungry wolves.
The advantages of the therapy are obvious. Bacteriophages are very specific parasites and, unlike antibiotics, do not damage the useful bacteria that live in and on the body. Phages are "intelligent" medicine: They increase just where they are needed, while antibiotics often do not get to where they are needed. Once all phage-susceptible bacteria have been killed, phages are eliminated from the body.
The phages' high specificity, with which they look for their bacterial victims, is at the same time also their therapeutic Achilles' heel. Therefore, either a cocktail containing many different types of phages must be developed by the infection control specialist, or a phage effective against the specific pathogen of each patient must be custom-made through detailed microbiological analytical work. Western regulatory authorities tend to loathe recognizing such manually manufactured anti-infective agents as medicines, which explains why currently phage therapy is routinely only available at phage therapy centers in Georgia (part of former Russia), Europe and Poland. However, the Wound Care Center in Lubbock, Texas, has started to treat patients. For chronic infections due to multi-resistant pathogens, phage therapy could become a kind of miracle medicine.
Throughout the book, interviews with researchers are skillfully intertwined with descriptions of actual patient experiences. The middle part of the book is outstanding in describing the trials and errors of phage therapy as practiced between 1930 and 1990. Here, journalist Häusler points out what influence political events have had on medical research—from the "Great Patriotic War" of Russia against Nazi Germany to the collapse of the Soviet Union and up to September 11, 2001. All this is augmented by a long list of footnotes, a detailed list of references and numerous instructive illustrations. Häusler has succeeded in writing a book that can be read by high school students and yet is useful and of interest to medical and phage therapy experts—an amazing feat!
Experts from the USA, U.K., Canada and Israel have praised the new English version as scientific journalism at its best and predict that readers will finish this book convinced that phage therapy will provide alternative treatment for superbug infections. Because of the public health significance of antibiotic-resistance and the superbug crisis, this book deserves to be on the shelf of every private and public library.
Source: Translation of a review of "Gesund Durch Viren—ein Ausweg aus der Antibiotika Krise" www.macmillanscience.com/1403987645.htm
Dr. Riedel, briedel@magma.ca , has a Ph.D. in Microbiology/Food Science. He has held various positions in research, industrial food science and consumer product regulatory affairs in Canada. In 2003 he organized and moderated a symposium entitled "Phage therapy as it applies to food public health bacteriology" at the Annual Meeting of the Institute of Food Technologists in Chicago and has given a number of presentations on phage therapy.