Bacteria that cannot be treated with antibiotics are one of the greatest medical threats of our time. In the fight against it, researchers are now rediscovering a hundred-year-old antidote that sounds almost too good to be true. In June 2018, Eva Maria Maicovski and her husband fly to Tbilisi, where they spend three weeks. They live in…
Antimicrobial Resistance killed over a million people in 2019. That figure is expected to rise to ten million by 2050. Antibiotics remain vital to modern medicine, but this hidden pandemic of drug-resistant superbugs is driving scientists to explore possible alternatives. One type of therapy in particular is attracting serious scientific interest: bacteriophages. Phages are viruses that…
It was on the golf course that Barry Rud first noticed something was seriously wrong. A trim 60-year-old who played hockey as a young man, he found himself unable to take more than a few steps without gasping for breath. His doctors said he had caught a strain of Pseudomonas aeruginosa, one of the growing…
Some bacteria have evolved resistance, creating a growing army of “superbugs” against which there is no effective treatment. Antimicrobial resistance is expected to kill 10m people a year by 2050, up from around 1m in 2019. But there is a promising, if obscure, alternative that is also worth a look. Microbiologists have known for decades that disease-causing bacteria can…
Antibiotika verlieren an Wirkung. Für Schwerkranke gibt es eine neue Hoffnung, die eigentlich alt ist: die Phagentherapie. Wer kann von den Viren, die keine Krankheiten verursachen, sondern Bakterien zerstören, profitieren? Anil war zwölf, als er zum ersten Mal Viren inhalierte. Er saß auf seinem Bett auf Station 63 der Medizinischen Hochschule Hannover (MHH), in der Klinik…
Es ist „seine letzte Chance“, sagt Dieter Offermann. Der 60-Jährige fliegt nach Tiflis, Georgien, um sein Bein zu retten. Seit sieben Jahren kämpft er gegen Bakterien, die nach einer Knie-OP in die Wunde eingedrungen sind. Kein Antibiotikum hilft. Die Ärzte raten zur Amputation. Wird die Phagentherapie in Georgien sein Bein retten können? Watch Here Source:…
It may seem strange after a pandemic that has killed millions and turned the world upside down, but viruses could save just as many lives. In a petri dish in a laboratory in the Georgian capital Tbilisi, a battle is going on between antibiotic resistant bacteria and “friendly” viruses. This small nation in the Caucasus…
Abstract Phage therapy can be an effective alternative to standard antimicrobial chemotherapy for control of Aeromonas hydrophila infections in aquaculture. Aeromonas hydrophila-specific phages AhMtk13a and AhMtk13b were studied for basic biological properties and genome characteristics. Phage AhMtk13a (Myovirus, 163,879 bp genome, 41.21% CG content) was selected based on broad lytic spectrum and physiologic parameters indicating its lytic nature.…
Bacteria-killing viruses can be used to treat antibiotic-resistant superbugs, and the approach has been tried in more than 100 people in Belgium since a 2019 change in regulations By Michael Le Page The use of bacteria-killing viruses known as phages to treat antibiotic-resistant infections is starting to take off in Belgium. More than 100 people have now been…
Abstract Aims: Sulphate-reducing bacteria (SRB) are ecologically important group of anaerobic micro-organisms that can reduce sulphate to form hydrogen sulphide-a toxic gas causing iron corrosion on metal surfaces. In this work, SRB strains were isolated from aquatic environments in the country of Georgia to determine their lysogenicity and the role of temperate phages in host metabolism.…