I got dysentery in a human challenge trial

It's not money for nothing and it's a bigger choice than people credit.

My eustachian tubes plugged up while I was flying home from my honeymoon. Three days later, my ears were still stopped up. I was in medical school at the time, so I went to the student health clinic (run by senior residents). I said that I had ear infections commonly as a child, that this ear had been plugged for three days, and could I have antibiotics? He said, let’s look first. He did. He then said, “no pain, just dulled hearing? No fevers?” Correct. “That’s the worst-looking eardrum I have ever seen in an adult. Here’s some amoxicillin-clavulanate.”

Antibiotics are broadly classified as bacteriostatic (prevents multiplication) or bacteriocidal (kills living bacteria). Amoxicillin (like all beta-lactam antibiotics) is bacteriocidal. Thirty minutes after I took my first dose, I vividly experienced this. Chills, fever, shivering, sweating that lasted for almost two hours as millions or billions of bacteria died and their dead cells entered my bloodstream. The second dose was not as bad but still unpleasant. By the third dose, I just felt a few minutes of unpleasantness. And after three days, my ear finally unplugged.

  What if the bacteria become resistant to the phages too?

  Well, that can happen easily – probably even easier than with antibiotics. Cells have been duking it out with viruses since the beginning of life. (Did you know CRISPR-Cas9, now used for gene editing, evolved in nature as a way for bacteria to recognize and cut up phage DNA?)

  But the difference is that whereas new antibiotics are very hard to find, there is a nigh-inexhaustible evolutionary font of phages constantly pulling ahead in the arms race. So in short: once a bacteria becomes resistant to your special phage, just find a new phage.

> For a sick person after antibiotics therapy and after culture test results, those days/weeks to raise another culture of phages might be deadly

The hope is that you'd have a bunch of phages ready to go from a variety of patients. So you wouldn't need to make a new culture. However, right now they often do personalized phage therapy because they can only get it approved as a last-hope kinda deal. But then it makes the scientists only target chronic infections, because it does take a couple months to get another cocktail of phages ready to go.