9 thoughts on “Anti-Biotic Resistance”

  1. I have great hopes for phage therapy, since pages can be evolved endlessly to work around resistance.

    1. The problem with phages, as I understand them, is that they are far from a broad-spectrum treatment. You need to get the right kind of phage that attacks the kind of bacteria in question.

      They may have a role for chronic conditions such as a wound that fails to heal leading to need to amputate a limb. You might have enough time in such cases to do the necessary tests to find out what phage will work. Otherwise, I don’t see them as a replacement for antibiotics.

      1. I think Rand posted an article here a few months ago about genetically-engineered phages curing antibiotic-resistant infections? I thought I’d saved a link, but I can’t find it.

        1. There was a recent result (I may have posted a link in a comment; link is repeated below) about some natural phages that target antibiotic resistant strains of a common pathogenic bacterium. The phage uses one of the proteins of the membrane efflux pump (which pumps antibiotics out of the cell) to attach to and attack the cells. The cells can mutate to avoid this, but in doing so they become drug sensitive again.

          http://www.nature.com/articles/srep26717

  2. This is good news. I’ve been avoiding feminist Hollywood B listers because the risk of drug resistant VD is just too high. Well, that and I don’t know any of them. But if I did, the VD risk would stop me from doing anything more than telling them how badly their last movie sucked.

    2. The Serbian assassin killed two people traveling in a car with only two shots from a .380, and with neither shot in the head. That takes divine intervention and I’m not going to interfere with that.

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