MRSA periodically hits the headlines in most cities throughout the world, but in any discussion concerning antibiotic-resistant bacteria, more generically know as MRSA, and of ways to fight them, mention must be made of bacteriohages, or 'phages' for short. Phages have successfully killed bacteria, strangely, without the intervention of any scientists, for billions of years and have evolved benignly alongside humans and animals for as long as we have been on this planet. There are biblical references in the Book of Kings to people being told to bathe in rivers to fight infections. Admittedly, this was just a tad before the electron microscope came along in the 1930s, but they were on to something (though the Ancients did not know that phages were extremely specific about which bacteria they ate).

Fredrick Twort (UK) & Felix d'Herelle (Canadian), also before the Electron Microscope age, realized that something was eating holes in bacterial cultures, something so small it could be filtered through porcelain and safely drunk by humans, but which killed bacteria very rapidly. Intravenous preparations were used to combat gas gangrene, both during WW1 and in the years before WW2. During WW2 German & Russian soldiers carried phages to prevent battlefield infections. Did Allied doctors ever wonder what they were for, or were they dismissed as being merely "foreign"?

Phages are the preferred method of treatment by people visiting their pharmacy in Georgia (Europe). It costs many millions to develop a new antibiotic, the prolonged use of which, as in cases of MRSA treatment, often causes liver and other organ damage, not to mention Clostridium difficile, a nasty infection of the digestive track made possible as beneficial gut bacteria are killed.

In stark contrast, it is quite cheap and quick to dip a bucket into a river/sewer and isolate the required phages, adding the new ones to your phage library. If the bacterium mutates, so do the phages. Phages inflict no collateral damage either. Clever, eh?

The public and new doctors are being brainwashed by the chemical companies to regard anything not high tech as quackery, especially foreign quackery. The U.K. drugs regulatory authority MHRA, which insists that any phage "medicine" must go through the same rigorous safety testing as for dangerous drugs, is wholly funded by drug company license fee payments; strange bedfellows, indeed. As long as this attitude prevails, phage therapy will eventually become the synthesized domain of the chemical companies, whose dropping of phages like a hot brick, once they had mastered antibiotic synthesis, could not possibly be confused with altruism.

High-tech solutions to killing bacteria are costing the U.K. Health Services billions of pounds per annum, while they ignore a safe, cheap but low-tech, simple and effective alternative. Here in the U.K., the much trumpeted 'Deep Clean' of our hospitals, costing many millions of pounds, has just finished, as if that were the end of it and all the bacteria were now dead and gone.

The wily Georgians, those foreigners who kept the phage flag flying all these years, know this not to be the case, because they regularly, and cheaply, spray their wards and operating theatres with phages to keep them clean. Sounds too simple and low tech to work. Oh yeah; so why are we the ones with an MRSA problem?

The complicity of governments in this tale must not be underestimated either; the UK chemical & bacterialogical warfare research department (now privatized), formerly known as Porton Down, has been sniffing around the Tbilisi phage labs, presumably with a view to bolstering their stocks of phages available for key personnel protection in the event of germ warfare. No sign as yet of a few crumbs off the table for poor Joe Public, despite the 1000's of U.K. MRSA deaths annually. I shouldn't think the United States government will be too far behind either in their quest for self preservation; indeed, they are probably well in the fore!

So, as you can see, the trillions of phages on this planet just won't go away and so deserve not to be left out of any discussion purporting to examine ways of killing bacteria. Why, after all, they invented the sport!