• Question: Can you name a way to treat pathogens successfully without antibiotics?

    Asked by Ben Mars to Daniela ?, ☣ Danna, Jonny, Juan, Lindsay on 15 Jun 2016.
    • Photo: Daniela Lobo

      Daniela Lobo answered on 15 Jun 2016:

      Hi Ben Mars,
      Have you heard about phage therapy? There are some European countries currently investing on that as an alternative for antibiotics.
      (Bacteriophages or simply phages, are virus that kill bacteria by infecting them and making the bacteria cell burst/”explode” when the virus is reproducing and coming out of the cell.)

    • Photo: Jonathan Hunter

      Jonathan Hunter answered on 15 Jun 2016:

      It depends if you’re inside or outside the body.
      Outside the human body you can UV light, alcohol, heat (above 120C), cold, high or low pH, high or low pressure and probably more.
      Inside the body it’s much harder as most of these things will kill us as well. But some treatments are looking at the use of physical rather than chemical methods of killing bacteria as it tends to be a lot harder for bacteria to gain resistance to these methods.

    • Photo: Danna Gifford

      Danna Gifford answered on 16 Jun 2016:

      Hello Ben,
      I agree with Daniela. Phage therapy is the most promising alternative to antibiotics. In Georgia (the country, not the state), you can buy phage therapy in bottles from the chemist, which are made to treat different specific illnesses (e.g. diarrhea, skin infections, etc.). They come in a little glass bottle which you can drink or put on your skin.

      Bacteria can evolve resistance to phages—pretty quickly too, in experiments I’ve seen it can be as little as 24hrs. But the nice thing about phage therapy is that phage themselves can evolve, too, and grow faster than bacteria, so can potentially evolve to keep up with bacterial resistance.

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