Dodge Pond, which sits on the outskirts of East Lyme, Conn., is an ordinary New England lake. It’s home to fish like bluegill and alewife, along with smaller organisms like water fleas, algae, and bacteria. There are viruses in Dodge Pond, too, most of which infect its bacteria. And one of Dodge Pond’s viruses, known…
Acinetobacter baumannii is a gram-negative, non-motile bacterium that, due to its multidrug resistance, has become a major nosocomial pathogen. The increasing number of multidrug resistant (MDR) strains has renewed interest in phage therapy. The aim of our study was to assess the effectiveness of phage administration in Acinetobacter baumannii wound infections in an animal model to demonstrate phage…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=7RSSNufzSYM&feature=youtu.be The history of medicine in Georgia holds a remarkable legacy that is now gaining global attention. This unique Stalin-era phage treatment was developed in Tbilisi as a sophisticated way to combat bacterial infections without relying on standard drugs. While the rest of the world focused on penicillin, local scientists perfected this Stalin-era phage treatment…
Bacteriophages are the most numerous viruses on Earth, and viruses are more common than bacteria, the most numerous of cellular organisms. Specifically, bacteriophages are the viruses of bacteria, that is, they are sequences of genes (genomes) which move around from bacterium to bacterium while encased within protein shells called capsids, often killing bacteria in the process. Bacteriophages are hugely important to the ecology and evolution of bacteria, have enormous impacts on the global carbon cycle (which among other things controls whether climates globally warm), represent one promising means by which medicine‘s current antibiotic crisis –…
It’s been used in the former USSR for a century. Now the West is taking notice Bacteriophage – or ‘phage’ for short – is a virus that infects bacteria. These naturally occurring infective agents contaminate bacteria and replicate once within. They are everywhere – including all over our bodies where they outnumber bacteria 10 to…
Surgeon Gabriel Weston visited the Eliava Institute in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia to find out more about a decades-old treatment that could prove vital in the battle against drug resistant superbugs. Our generation has been lucky enough to live through a golden age in medicine – the age of antibiotics, where drugs to…
Once upon a time, antibiotics revolutionized healthcare. Nowadays, however, their overuse and the rise of drug-resistant infections are cause for alarm. An Evergreen Specialty Since 1973 by Meryl Lipman with Annie Ferguson ’15 Every year, antibiotic-resistant infections kill more than 50,000 people in Europe and the United States alone. A study commissioned in Britain suggests such…
Today is the day the antibiotic era ends. British scientists announced this week that they have found bacteria that are resistant to our final antibiotic frontier – polymyxins, a last-resort drug used when nothing else works. Discovered in hospitalised patients in China, the superbugs, similar to E.coli, have probably already spread to Laos and Malaysia. And scientists…