Wound infections, gonorrhea, tuberculosis, pneumonia, septicemia and childhood ear infections are just a few of the diseases that have become hard to treat with antibiotics due to increasing use and misuse of these treatments.
Russia has been using an alternative to antibiotics for the past 90 years. They use bacteriophages.
A phage is a virus that attacks the bacteria with no negative side effects on the host organism (human) and beneficial bacteria like gut flora.
This reduces the chances of opportunistic infections that often occur during treatment with antibiotics.
Russia is currently using phages to treat infections that do not respond to antibiotics. Antibiotics can not penetrate bacteria that consist of cells sticking together, but phages are successful against these strains.
No therapies using phages are authorized for use on humans in any country besides Russia and Georgia—except for phages used to kill the bacteria that cause food poisoning.
In a recent study, 25% of bacterial pneumonia cases were shown to be resistant to penicillin, and an additional 25% of cases were resistant to more than one antibiotic. Although bacteria can become resistant to a certain phage, it can still be destroyed by another type.
