My Husband Became a Poster Child of the Post-Antibiotic Era

Post by superbug_slayer » Mon, May 06, 2019, 2:11 PM UTC

Fomite wrote: post #56

BurningFrog wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying there might be some survivor bias in this article? Maybe 100 other equally qualified spouses tried equally ambitious programs to save someone, they all died, and we never heard about it...

Not necessarily as much as... Right now, antibiotics are a point-and-shoot, frontline treatment for things, and phage therapy is a sort of "treatment of last resort" bespoke therapy. Are phage super-useful for cases like the one in the article, where you have something super-resistant like Acinetobacter? Yes. Is there much hope, near term, that they'll work as a drop-in replacement for the antibiotics we're losing? N…

Agree!

Post by Fomite » Tue, May 07, 2019, 5:32 AM UTC

superbug_slayer wrote: post #110

Fomite wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having seen her speak in person at IDWeek, I think an important thing to recognize is that the amount of work that went into treating her husband was pretty damned heroic - and it's not clear that that's not the standard for phage therapy. I literally have a standard "Why phage are a problem", from the perspective of an infectious disease epidemiologist whose been super-interested in phage for like...a decade. 1) The…

As the author of the op-ed you are referring to, allow me to chime in. It's true that a huge effort went into saving my husband's life with phage therapy but as a result of that, it's getting easier to treat other cases. I'll comment on your other points too: 1) Broad spectrum phages don't exist in nature but gene-editing techniques can be applied and this technology now exists. Several biotechs are now working in th…

For the record, your talk at IDWeek last year was one of the highlights of the conference.

To touch on a few of your points:

1) I'm hopeful about these, and have been sort of idly following them, but I think they're a long way from anywhere close to the utility the average HackerNews reader is hoping to get out of them.

2) When compared to "There's an inert, shelf-and-temperature stable blister pack of these living at the bottom of a bag" they're hard to keep alive.

While not relevant in your husband's case, the vast burden of AMR is going to end up falling on the global poor, and in those cases, solutions that require a cold chain aren't reliable solutions.

3) It is exploding, but I've been following phage research for 15 years now, and it's one of those technologies that has lived in the "any day now" space that whole time. So I tend to try to temper the expectation of folks because I fear that it's going to end up, at best, as a supplemental solution to a very complex problem, rather than the "a new technology will get us out of this" path the popular media sometimes portrays it as.

Re: My Husband Became a Poster Child of the Post-Antibiotic Era

Re: My Husband Became a Poster Child of the Post-Antibiotic Era