In the past, stepping into a dirty puddle or getting a cut had the potential to kill you, but all that changed when humans discovered the miracle drug. Antibiotics have existed for over seventy years, since Alexander Flemming first discovered Penicillin, however today due to excessive usage of antibiotics, bacteria have started to grow resistant and even immune to such medication, which can eventually cause diseases like Cholera, Pneumonia and Jaundice to skyrocket in their fatality rates. This is where phages enter the picture.
We often identify viruses to be a terrible thing, especially since the covid pandemic, however phages are a virus that can potentially be more effective than most medication. The surprising part of their story is that very few people have heard of them, as there are more of them than every other organism on Earth combined. The reason why we are unaffected by them is because while most harmful bacteria use somatic(body) cells as their hosts, leading to their deaths, bacteriophages use bacteria as hosts, using them to reproduce and kill the bacteria in the process.
The reason for the ever growing necessity for this form of alternative treatment is because we have been using antibiotics for needless reasons for decades, causing bacteria to mutate and form superbugs, rendering most, if not all current antibiotics ineffective. In 2020 alone 1.2 million people were killed due to antibiotic resistant bacteria. Phages meanwhile do not have such weakness. They are able to evolve independently just like bacteria, leading to an arms race of sorts between the microorganisms.
There have been multiple successful cases of phages successfully saving people’s lives when antibiotics fail and since 2016 more and more clinical trials for bacteriophages have begun. The process of approval of Phage Therapy is being done by the American Food and Drug Administration and in just a few years, we many be able to see to the end of one of the leading causes of death in the world.
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