When doctors told Christophe Novou that his leg would have to be amputated at the hip due to a raging bacterial infection, the 47-year-old Frenchman thought about killing himself.
After surviving a crippling traffic accident and dozens of operations to repair the damage, to him life in a wheelchair just did not seem worth living.
That's when an article about a clinic in Georgia offering an obscure treatment for hard-to-treat infections using live virus -- something called phage therapy -- caught his eye.
Within hours, he was on a plane to Tblisi.
"Without it, I wouldn't be here," Novou told AFP on the sidelines of a conference in Paris about the mostly forgotten therapy, which remains marginal outside a few former Soviet bloc countries.
The treatment harnesses viruses called phages to attack and kill dangerous bacteria, including "superbugs" which have become progressively resistant to antibiotics.
You can read the rest @
http://news.yahoo.com/fighting-infections-viruses-antibiotics-fail-092102629.html
What a cool idea. Hope it works.
I wonder why US medicine is not doing something similar? Perhaps this is the reason why:
Pharmaceutical companies have shown little interest in phage therapy, in large part because viruses cannot be patented, according to participants at the Paris conference.
"The laboratories have turned their back on this because the return on investment is just too small," said Jean Carlet, an expert on infectious diseases and a consultant for the WHO.
What plans do our doctors have for fighting infections in the post antibiotic age? My guess is "none at all", especially if there is no profit in doing so.
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