MRSA and its Treatment

Following the recent 7 part series of 'MRSA and its Treatment' in The
Epoch Times, I penned this reply.

Shortly afterwards, I was contacted by their Opinion Editor Stephen
Gregory, to ask if I would consent to my article appearing in their North
American editions.

Western Health authorities seem bent on using just high-tech methods,
pushed on them by Big Pharma, while ignoring the simple, cheap and
low-tech solutions, for reasons that evade common sense.

Dear Sir/Madam,
Your recent series about 'MRSA and its treatment' was excellent, apart
from one vitally important ommission, and that was bacteriophages, 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. Admitedly,
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, realised 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 prefered 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 nasty
Clostridium difficile as beneficial gut bacteria are klled.

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 UK 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 synthesised domain of
the chemical companies, whose dropping of phages like a hot brick, once
they had mastered antibiotic synthesss, could not possibly be confused
with altruism.

High-tech solutions to killing bacteria are costing Health Services
billions per annum, while they ignore a safe, cheap but low-tech, simply
and effective alternative. Here in the UK, 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 privatised), 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 UK MRSA deaths annually. I
shouldn't think the US government will be too far behind either in their
quest for self preservation; indeed, they are probably well in the fore!

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

Yours sincerely,

Mike Jozefiak

To get an idea of some of the low-tech methods that can quite effectively
deal with viruses and bacteria, visit Relax
Well for a common-sense and patient-friendly approach to killing bacteria.