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Posted by G.W. (Bill) Riedel on 20:51:19 2004/10/05
I have finally been able to get a copy of the book reviewed below and have read it. I highly recommend it to all who are interested in pahge therapy or who are diabetic and risk the possibility of leg infections with antibiotic-resistant bacteria. In Germany a doctor from Georgia has treated 9 patients with severe antibiotic-resistant infections and it appears to have worked with 7. At the time of publication trails with diabetic patients were planned.
This is a comprehensive book on bacteriophage therapy.
Book review:
GESUND DURCH VIREN - EIN AUSWEG AUS DER ANTIBIOTIKA-KRISE.
German book by Thomas Häusler, Piper, München, September 2003, 275 Seiten - amazon.de Preis: EUR 15,90.
Healthy Through Viruses - a way out of the antibiotic-resistance crisis.
In 1969 the Surgeon General of the United States, William H. Stewart announced that; it is time to close the books on microbial infections! The war against epidemics due to pathogens has been won. Seldom has medical dogma pronounced by the highest ranking medical officer of the USA
been rendered absurd so rapidly. Actually infections due to pathogens did temporarily decrease during the 1960's; however, only to return twenty years later with increased vehemence.
After the political collapse of the Soviet Union the number of cases of consumption doubled there within only seven years. Today in the area of Aral Sea one of 300 inhabitants is sick with tuberculosis - a dramatically high number. Between 1972 to 1992 in New York a disease epidemic due to multi-resistant mycobacteria was rampant with approximately 400 new infections per year and it cost an estimated billion dollar to control this outbreak. Nosocomial infections - hospital acquired infections - and multi-resistant pathogens, terms which until recently were familiar only to experts, are today topics of the public press. And it is not surprising because in Germany alone 20000 people die annually of nosocomial infections.
The prospects for the future are still gloomier. While it took approximately fifty years for 95 per cent of Staphylococcus aureus strains to become resistant to penicillin, today certain problem bacteria need only a few years to acquire resistance even to totally new classes of antibiotics. Additionally, the pharmaceutical industry no longer has many success-promising chemical substances in the research pipeline as they had a decade ago. At the same time; however, the need for effective antibiotics continues to increase: Ever more patients must be protected against the threat of infections because of weakened immune systems or because they are organ transplant recipients.
New hope is promised by a therapy which is substantially older than penicillin: treatment with bacteriophages. On August 2, 1919 their discoverer, the French Canadian Felix d Herelle, administered a cloudy broth containing Shigella phages to a deathly-ill boy at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, curing him of dysentery. After an early, world-wide boom, this therapy today exists essentially only in the former Soviet republic of Georgia and is only now again receiving attention in the West, even if many infection control specialists remain sceptical.
This paradigm shift is the background for an unusually well researched, outstandingly well written and scientifically based book by the Swiss journalist Thomas Häusler. From the beginnings to the present the author, who also holds a doctorate in biochemistry, describes all aspects of a concept (bacteriophage therapy), whose therapeutic potential is not easily communicated during times of AIDS and SARS.
Bacteriophages are actually extremely dangerous viruses, however with an important difference; they have specialized in attacking bacterial cells and they do no harm to animal cells. When a phage discovers a bacterium to which it possesses the correct key - that is to say: that on the bacterial cell surface there are suitable receptors to which the phage can attach with its tentacle-like extensions - then the phage will inject its hereditary DNA into the bacteria cell within minutes. Taking-over the bacterial cell s biochemical apparatus hundreds of phage copies are then produced. Special enzymes [(Holine and lysine)?] break the cell wall open from the inside, the victim dies, and the released daughter phages attack any remaining bacterial cells like a pack of hungry wolves.
The advantages of the therapy are obvious. Bacteriophages are very specific parasites and, contrary to antibiotics, do not damage the useful bacteria, which live in and on the body. Due to their mode of action they can not induce resistance, and if a pathogen is insensitive, then it most likely that there exists another virus (phage), which will act as the bacteria killer. Phages are "intelligent" medicines: They increase just where they are needed (while antibiotics often do not even get to where they are to work).
The high specificity, with which phages look for their bacterial victims, is at the same time also their therapeutic Achilles' heel. Either the infection control specialist must have a cocktail containing very many different types of phages, or a phage specifically effective against the pathogen of each patient must be custom-made through detailed microbiological analytical work and must then be mass-produced. In both cases regulatory authorities tend to loath recognizing such manually manufactured anti-infective agents as medicines.
For chronic infections on outside and internal body surfaces due to multi-resistant pathogens, which can not be treated with current methods, phage therapy could become a kind miracle medicine. Additionally, phages could bring an end to feeding antibiotics in large-scale animal production.
Throughout the book, interviews with researchers, who are active at the front new developments, are skillfully intertwined with descriptions of actual patient outcomes. The middle part of the book is also outstanding in describing the trails and errors of phage therapy as practiced between 1930 and 1990. Here journalist Häusler points out, what influence political events have on the medical research - from the "Great Patriotic War" of Russia against Nazi Germany to the collapse of the Soviet Union and up to September 11, 2001. A long list of footnotes, a detailed list of references and numerous instructive illustrations supplement the text excellently.
A book dealing with an explosive topic, as one cannot make it better.
( Original in German by Hermann Feldmeier at amazon.de
translated by G.W. (Bill) Riedel)
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