Could this be the holy grail in the battle to beat
They’re thriving because of massive overuse of antibiotics. But experts — and these families — believe viruses found in the most bizarre places may be the answer...
Most mothers-to-be expect their lives to change for ever with the birth of their first child, but Catherine Farrer could not have prepared for the shock news delivered to her half-way through her first pregnancy.
It had been otherwise straightforward until a routine mid-pregnancy scan at 22 weeks
‘I was told my daughter had an echogenic bowel, where the bowel looks brighter than normal on the ultrasound due to an abnormality,’ recalls Catherine, 35, who works part-time for a City financial services regulator and lives in East Dulwich, south London, with her husband Giles, 37, an oil and gas industry analyst.
An echogenic bowel is a marker for a number of conditions including cystic fibrosis, a genetic disorder that causes mucus to build up in the lungs and digestive system, affecting their function. Although life expectancy has risen thanks to modern medicine, many patients do not live beyond their 40s.
the diagnosis of cystic fibrosis was confirmed after Kate was born nearly five years ago. Her arrival was the start of a roller coaster ride of health scares that has meant more than 50 courses of antibiotics already.
While healthy lungs are able to clear bacteria, in cystic fibrosis they can’t, which means bacteria are able to colonise the mucus. And some of these pathogens are very difficult to treat.
‘Kate recently suffered an infection that lasted for 18 months,’ says Catherine. ‘In that time she had 14 courses of oral antibiotics, two weeks of two different types of intravenous antibiotics and two months of antibiotic treatment with a nebuliser spray into her nose. In the long term, she is likely to become infected with bacteria that are multiple antibiotic resistant.’
Caring for Kate has exposed Catherine and Giles to the worrying realities of antibiotic resistance.
More than 70 years of blanket antibiotic use for human and animal diseases has given rise to generations of superbugs — resistant bacteria that have mutated into new lethally infectious organisms impervious to antibiotic attack.
the more antibiotics are used to kill the susceptible bacteria, the more living space has been left for resistant bugs to flourish, creating a growing risk that infections contracted from grazed knees, chest bugs or routine surgical operations could become deadly.
However, there is another potential treatment that could help where antibiotics fall short: phage therapy. Phage is the name for a virus that attacks bacteria. these can be cultured in a laboratory and then used to selectively infect and destroy those that cause disease.
Britain’s chief medical officer, Dame sally Davies, recently issued dire warnings that antibiotic resistance is as big a threat to the long-term future of the human race as climate change.
Already an estimated 50,000 people in the UK are dying each year from antibiotic-resistant infections, according to the charity Antibiotic Research UK.
the lung condition tuberculosis, which was previously treatable with antibiotics, is re-emerging as a leading cause of death.
URGENT NEED FOR NEW TREATMENTS
THE pressing need for new ways to tackle infection has led researchers to the promise offered by phage therapy — which is generally made to order by identifying the bacterium responsible for an infection, then finding the virus known to attack that particular pathogen.
Phages can be applied to the skin, swallowed or given intravenously, depending on the site of the infection.
though they have been used successfully since the 1930s in the former soviet Union, where antibiotics were scarce, in the West they fell out of favour. Now, however, phages are emerging as a life-saver here, with a growing number of reports of extraordinary recoveries among people engulfed by apparently untreatable infection.
Last month, phage treatment was given the seal of approval by the influential scientific journal Nature Medicine, which reported how phage therapy had helped save Isabelle Carnell-Holdaway, a 15-year-old girl from Faversham, Kent, who was dying from a drugresistant infection following a lung transplant for cystic fibrosis.
Her successful treatment — having been given less than 1 per cent chance of survival, Isabelle is now studying for her A-levels and learning to drive — was the first time that Mycobacterium abscessus, the bacterium killing her, had been controlled by a phage.
‘Isabelle’s recovery is incredible,’ her mother Joanne told Good Health. ‘this time last year, we had been told that she would die.’ Another remarkable example of phages’ life-saving effect is the story of tom Patterson, a U.s. scientist whose case was reported in Good Health two years ago.
this week his wife, steffanie strathdee, who is also a scientist, has published a book, the Perfect Predator, in which she recounts his miraculous recovery from a killer bug, Acinetobacter baumannii, he contracted on holiday in Egypt.
the bacterium belongs to one of the top 12 families of dangerous superbugs, according to the World Health organisation.
tom Patterson’s extraordinary recovery has led to the establishment of a Center for Innovative Phage Applications at the University of California san Diego, and the U.s. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) is likely to license an increasing number of requests for phage therapies.
Meanwhile, his story prompted a flurry of other heroic efforts to use phages to treat rampant bac