Fitness Files: We already have an alternative to antibiotics

The envelope came addressed in clear round letters, readable by any second-grader.

From it emerged an article with a Post-It on which was written, in the same clear script, “This is REALLY [underlined 3 times] interesting.”

Yes, Mare, and really gross.

Guam Naik, writing for the Wall Street Journal Europe on Jan., 26, describes a witches brew “composed of the Paris sewer, a well in Mali and a filthy river in India,” applied to a woman’s badly burned and hopelessly infected back.

I had to read all the way to the end of the article to discover what I will tell you immediately. Her burn healed, and she recovered.

I have noted the growing threat of antibiotic-resistant pathogens in the U.S. The point of the article that my friend Mare sent me is that Eastern Europe has utilized an alternative to antibiotics for decades.

“Phages,” such as the burn victim’s “liquid treatment,” made up of 1 billion viruses called bacteriophages, are natural killers of bacteria, according to Naik.

Their use predates antibiotics, but with the advent of penicillin, Western medicine did not pursue them. However, a long history of their utility can be traced in the former Soviet Union. Today, antibiotic drug resistance is a healthcare crisis, so Western medicine is returning to an investigation of phages.

According to the National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health, bacteriophages are “bacterial viruses that invade bacterial cells and disrupt” them. Phages’ long history includes limiting the spread of cholera in 1896 and hemorrhagic dysentery in French troops in 1915.

French-Canadian microbiologist Felix d’Herelle of the Pasteur Institute in Paris named them in 1915. The word “phage” comes from the Greek “phagein (to eat or devour), implying that phages eat or devour bacteria.

In the 1940s, the Eli Lilly Co. produced “sterile broth cultures” of seven phage products for human use, targeting staphylococci, streptococci, E-coli and other bacterial pathogens.

The National Library reports that institutes in Germany and Poland have produced sterile phage solutions to treat pulmonary, urinary and post-operative infections. Most hopeful is the report that phages were used against multidrug-resistant bacteria.

So who’s looking into phages in the U.S.? The NIH tells of the 1998 introduction of phage investigation by Alexander Sulakvelidze, a visiting researcher from Georgia in the former Soviet Union. He was stunned to hear of the frustrations of Dr. Glenn Morris of the University of Maryland School of Medicine that multidrug-resistant infections were killing patients.

“It was like lightning struck,” Sulakvelidze is quoted as saying in a report on the National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health web page. “People die because Western medicine is no longer aware of phage therapy.”

Together, Sulakvelidze and Morris launched Baltimore, Md.,-based biotech company Intralytix in 1998. They produced “cocktails” of phages, which “go after only bad bacteria,” says Sulakvelidze. By comparison, he says, antibiotics also kill good bacteria as the collateral damage of war.

Intralytix treatments for bacteria that cause food-borne illness are currently being used in food processing plants.

Elsewhere, researchers from Rockefeller University in New York City are working on purified lysins produced by bacteriophages to treat scarlet fever, rheumatic fever, the flesh-eating disease, pneumonia and acne.

Zhiqiang Hu, an associate professor in the environmental engineering department at the University of Missouri, Columbia, who has conducted studies of bacteria at water treatment plants, isolated phages and tested them against chlorine. Chlorine removed 40% of the bacteria, phages killed 89%, and phages followed by chlorine knocked out 97%, he reported.

Problems remain. New phages may need to be developed as bacteria adapts. Workers at laboratories, developing phages in the presence of pathogenic bacteria, could be at risk. And patients may reject medicine derived from viruses.

Newport Beach resident CARRIE LUGER SLAYBACK, since turning 70, has run the Los Angeles Marathon and the Carlsbad Marathon.