Member-only story
When Capitalism Threatens Medicine
I was reading about bacteriophage therapy (phage therapy) and will confess I ended up horrified by our American attitude of near-total dismissiveness towards this amazing and proven “last line of defense” medical therapy so effective at killing the antibiotic-resistant bacteria now killing us.
What is phage therapy? In brief, it’s using the viruses which destroy bacteria to kill bacteria which are sickening or killing us. It’s the old scenario: the enemy of my enemy is my friend. You might recoil in horror at the idea of someone introducing live virus into your system. That’s a needless worry. These viruses go in and destroy harmful bacteria and then die off as soon as their bacterial “assembly stations” die off. This is a targeted therapy. Unlike antibiotics, they don’t kill off the good bacteria you want in your body.
Most projections now show that deaths from antibiotic-resistant bacteria will outstrip deaths by cancer sometime around the year 2050. One would assume that in a rational world this predicted outcome will be altered by our awareness of it.
Phage therapy is one thing that could alter that outcome. Medical research is now going so fast that it might be a completely different therapeutic approach which solves this growing problem of resistant bacteria. Even people seriously invested in this problem rarely want to address…
