Never forget: Sometimes the most unorthodox treatment is the one that gets the job done.
Steffanie Strathdee is an infectious disease expert. Several years ago she was watching her husband Tom die from a bacterial super-infection, one that doctors simply could not treat:
After months of ups and downs, doctors had just told her that her husband, Tom Patterson, was too racked with bacteria to live.
But Tom wanted to live. He told her as much. And so Stephanie opted for a Hail Mary of a medical treatment: Injecting Tom with phages, "viruses created by nature to eat bacteria."
You may remember phages from that one day in bio class during your sophomore year of high school. They're the spidery-looking things that are lethally good at attacking bacteria inside your body:
Those boys can get the job done! As an expert, Stephanie knew it. And so she "convinced phage scientists around the country to hunt and peck through molecular haystacks of sewage, bogs, ponds, the bilge of boats and other prime [bacterial] breeding grounds" in order to find both bacteria and their phage enemies.
Somehow the doctors went along with this. You know, doctors, they're obviously indispensable in modern society. But they also tend to be markedly resistant to, you know, professional suggestions. They like to do things their own way. I guess she caught them on a good day.
After a miraculous greenlighting by the Food and Drug Administration, doctors cobbled the phage treatment together, after which,
Strathdee watched doctors intravenously inject the mixture into her husband's body — and save his life.
Amazing.
Tom, according to Stephanie, was very likely "the first person to receive intravenous phage therapy to treat a systemic superbug infection in the US." He's very much a medical pioneer — and the pioneering treatment appears to work.
Stephanie admitted candidly that scientists "don't think phages are ever going to entirely replace antibiotics."
But "they will be a good adjunct to antibiotics. And in fact, they can even make antibiotics work better," she said.
We need every tool in the medical arsenal to fight the latest generation of bacterial threats. Good to see people are developing them.
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