Bacteriophage therapy, the amazing cure for MRSA being ignored by mainstream medicine

Sunday, February 24, 2013 by: Jonathan Benson, staff writer
Tags: bacteriophage therapy, MRSA, cure

(NaturalNews) It has been used as an effective treatment against bacterial infections for nearly 100 years, but the medical-industrial complex today refuses to recognize it as a valid form of medicine. And yet bacteriophage therapy, also known as phage therapy, has been shown time and time again to cure methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and various other antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which increasingly plague hospitals and healthcare facilities around the world and have no officially-recognized cure.

If you have never heard of phage therapy, it is probably because the American medical system largely abandoned it back in the 1950s and 1960s when antibiotic drugs arrived on the scene. Even though bacteriophages, which are basically viruses that infect and replicate within harmful bacteria in order to destroy them, work better than antibiotics and typically do not cause bacteria to morph and mutate, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has been largely uncooperative in approving them for general use in humans.

Using deactivated viruses to naturally destroy harmful bacteria

First discovered by two French microbiologists back in the late 1910s, bacteriophages, or "bacteria eaters," work by infecting harmful bacteria with deactivated viruses that essentially destroy them from the inside out. Unlike antibiotics, bacteriophage therapy works best when it is customized to target only specific bacteria, which is particularly important for protecting beneficial probiotic bacteria in the gut that would otherwise be harmed using traditional antibiotic therapy.

"From a therapeutic perspective ... phage therapy can eliminate an individual patient's infection without affecting the body's communities of beneficial bacteria," explains a 2012 study on phage therapy published online in the journal Frontiers in Microbiology. "In this light, phage therapy represents a kind of biomedical 'smart bomb,' affecting only a specific target and minimizing collateral damage. (And) side effects from phages in human studies involving both sick and healthy individuals have been extremely rare."

Phage therapy making comeback after being misused and discarded in favor of antibiotics

However, because phage therapy is not as easily administered as antibiotics, widespread misuse led to its gradual demise and eventual replacement with antibiotics. Faulty clinical trials led to mixed results for phage therapy, and the emergence of antibiotics, which initially appeared to be a surefire cure for bacterial infections, all but eliminated the use of phage therapy.

But now that antibiotics are proving to be a failure, having led to widespread antibiotic resistance around the world, phage therapy is once again gaining traction in the progressive medical community as a legitimate cure for bacterial infection. Doctors and health practitioners legitimately interested in finding a cure for "superbugs" are recognizing that phage therapy holds a lot of promise, and that the FDA needs to stop discriminating against this safe and effective natural therapy.

"At its best, phage therapy is a form of personalized medicine because specific phages (usually multiple phages combined as a multivalent cocktail) are carefully selected to treat a patient's specific bacterial infection," adds the Frontiers in Microbiology study. "Success rates from these customized phages are five to sixfold higher than that of standardized phage products, so the use of personalized phage cocktails has historically been crucial for effective treatment."

One of the leading voices in promotion of phage therapy today is Grace Filby, a Winston Churchill Fellow who has visited phage therapy laboratories in Republic of Georgia, Poland, and elsewhere where the therapy is still being used. Based on her ongoing analysis, phage therapy holds the answer to curing MRSA and other antibiotic-resistant bacteria in many people, and deserves to be taken more seriously by the medical establishment.

Sources:

http://www.amazingphage.info/

http://deepwide.co.uk/Phages.html

http://idsa.confex.com/idsa/2011/webprogram/Paper31825.html

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3400130/