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Comment by halviti | Hacker News Reader

There is a natural way to kill every single bacteria out there. They are called phages.

For every bacteria, there is a phage that will kill it.

Back in the Soviet Union they used this medical technology extensively to cure all sorts of things, and the hospitals in Georgia and surrounding areas would be sprayed down with phage to kill bacteria within the hospital corridors and rooms to prevent the hospitals themselves from becoming breeding grounds for bacteria.

If you're interested in learning more I would recommend the 1997 BBC four documentary called 'The Virus that Cures'

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Quack flags: "natural", silver bullet, forgotten techniques from the past, citation is a documentary

Agreed about the flags. However in this case it may be a false positive.

http://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/lancet/PIIS0140-6736(...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3400130/pdf/fmi...

http://aac.asm.org/content/51/6/2156.long

A long comment on MetaFilter by someone doing their Ph.D. research on phage biology.

http://metatalk.metafilter.com/21925/Interesting-Profiles#10...

Excerpt:

> Over the last fifteen years or so, with the breakup of the Soviet Union and the exponentially growing crisis of antibiotic resistance, phage therapy is looking very exciting again. Unlike the ‘30s, we now have a decent understanding of phage biology as well as the infrastructure to keep phages cold until use, effective diagnostic tools, and most importantly, regulatory structures that shut out hucksters. The need is also dire, for example multi-drug resistant Staph infections kill more people in the United States than AIDS does.

> Basic phage biology has also been undergoing a resurgence as we discover just how important phages are to the global ecosystem, they are indeed the dominant organism on Earth outnumbering anything else by two orders of magnitude. Indeed, despite being just ~125 nm tall (check this out for scale), if one were to stack the 1031 phages on the planet end to end you would get a tower that would stand 200 million lightyears tall. Our oceans are remarkably free of cellular life and the reason is phages, as well as the other the viruses of microbes. For example the growth and death of algae blooms are centrally mediated by viral dynamics. Meta-genomics studies of the oceans pull out more predicted phage proteins than anything else without some fancy filtering, and even then they get a bunch. Phages are also teaching us a lot about the primordial origins of life, they are after all proto-cellular organisms.

> These days are exciting times to be interested in phages.

A 1997 documentary by a TV channel that didn't launch until 2002, no less!

I think the problem with phages was that it was too expensive and needed selective manufacturing per targeted bacteria. I can imagine a personalized medicine approach working out well once we have better (and fully automated) tech for it.

Yeah, from what I can tell (I'm not a professional in this field) the underlying issue here seems to be that bacteria are evolving faster than the fungi and molds that produce antibiotics. The solution is to find something that evolves faster than bacteria: viruses. Bacteria will never evolve as fast as viruses because their reproductive cycles are much longer.

The opposition to bacteriophage research comes from the belief that bacteriophage research could accidentally produce viruses that are deadly to humans or be used as a cover for biological weapons research. But these concerns are invalid: bacteria and human cells are drastically different, and so are the viruses that attack them: there's no chance that bacteriophages will mutate into viruses that attack human cells. And as the necessary equipment to do research on viruses becomes cheaper and cheaper and more easily constructable from widely available components, blocking legitimate bacteriophage research does less and less to prevent illegal biological weapons research.

> bacteria and human cells are drastically different

Doesn't that sort of depend on what you consider a human cell? Our gut bacteria is supposed to be fairly important to us, and something that might affect it on a large scale might have consequences.

Note, that I'm not saying that bacteriophage use if harmful, just that you have to be careful when discounting possible harmful side-effects. History is rife with examples of new safe health technologies that we only understand the negative aspects of later.

Ah, yeah, that's an interesting concern. Anyone with more knowledge about microbes want to weigh in on how much of a concern this really is?

Um, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_microbiota --- in human bodies, "bacteria seem to outnumber cells 10 to 1".

Mitochondria, the "power houses of cells" seem to be bacteria.

Nope, the problem is you need to identify the specific Bacteria that's causing a problem before you can use a bacteriophage to fight it. Antibiotics are much simpler to use.

> Nope, the problem is you need to identify the specific Bacteria that's causing a problem before you can use a bacteriophage to fight it.

Uh, that's not actually an issue as I understand it. The treatment, as I understand it, works by starting with a sample of infected tissue from the infected person. The bacteriophages are then grown starting from a few different kinds of starters, but the process I read about starts with a broad spectrum of bacteriophages. As long as a bacteriophage is close enough to being able to attack the desired bacteria, it some percentage of the bacteriophages will mutate into the exact bacteriophages you want. Since the available food for the bacteriophages is the bacteria you want to kill, the bacteriophage specific to that bacteria grows exponentially until there are enough bacteriophages. At this point the solution contains a large number of bacteriophages specifically bred to kill the bacteria in question. The solution is reintroduced into the infected tissue, where it eats most of the bacteria.

> Antibiotics are much simpler to use.

Chanting healing spells is simpler to use than antibiotics and in a few decades time it will be equally effective.

Getting the broad spectrum of bacteriophages is not easy. Nor is a sample of infected tissue (ex: meningitis).

Don't get me wrong, it could be a viable backup. But, it's not nearly as useful for things like surgery where you want to knock everything down before there is a problem. And it's not nearly as cheap as handing out penicillin was.

PS: Another issue is separating out the Bacteria phages without introducing a lot of new possible infections.

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