bacteriophage

I'm still waiting for bacteriophage vials to be available in my local CVS.

Following the afore mentioned article one commenter remarked that Dr. Srinivasan did a great job or spooking us, but there was absolutely no mention of bacteriophage during the interview, which got me curious.

One alternative to antibiotics that may work, but will have a tremendous difficulty in clearing the regulatory burden for approving new drugs and medical procedures, is bacteriophage therapy.

From the story "Logic of Empire":"The general bacteriophage which has so nearly eliminated disease caused by pathogenic micro-organisms on Earth was found capable of a subtle modification which made it potent against the analogous but different diseases of Venus.

The point I was actually trying to make is that bacteriophage treatments haven't really caught on in the west because it's expensive and time consuming - you have to create a specific line of bacteriophages for a specific bacteria, which is much more difficult than just using broad-spectrum antibiotics.

With genetic engineering, create bacteria that function as a supplemental immune system, but in a very narrow way; the bacteria would, possibly in collaboration with the host immune system, generate specific bacteriophages for any pathogenic bacteria they come into contact with.

Bacteriophage-generating bacteria could be hijacked by viruses, mutated by gene transfer with harmful bacteria to do bad things, or even give their bacteriophage-generating properties to pathological bacteria which might then gain mutations to generate human-targeting viruses... wouldn't that be fun.