Patient advocate extraordinaire

Many, if not most, of us have served as advocates when a loved one has become ill. We have searched for answers on the internet, questioned doctors, stayed by the bedside in the hospital, and did our best to make sure he or she is being cared for. I just finished a book recommended by my friend Laura called The Perfect Predator: A Scientist’s Race to Save Her Husband from a Deadly Superbug. Talk about being a patient advocate!

The author, an epidemiologist, and her husband are vacationing in Egypt. He becomes terribly ill and is taken by ambulance to a rather dingy clinic near Luxor where he is diagnosed with pancreatitis. From there, he’s airlifted to Germany and from there to their home-base hospital in San Diego. They find his body is infected with an antibiotic-resistant superbug (Acinetobacter baumannii). In fact, the bacteria have colonized his whole body. None of the 12 antibiotics they give him has any effect. The hospital is keeping him alive with all the equipment you can imagine. Months go by. His organs are shutting down and he’s near death.

His wife and author of the book, Steffanie Strathdee, begins searching the internet for anything that might save her husband and comes across a paper on phages—viruses that attack bacteria. (A single drop of water can harbor a trillion phages. They’re everywhere: in soil oceans, and our bodies.) In Europe and the US, a few labs are doing research on phages in anticipation of the time when more and more bacteria become resistant to antibiotics. The Navy’s lab is one of these. Steffanie begins contacting the labs and enlisting the help of the scientific community in San Diego. The labs are willing to help, but they must first find the specific phage that attacks her husband’s bacteria (sewage treatment plants are good sources).

In a nail-biting sequence of events that involve the labs, the hospital, the FDA, shipments of the patient’s bacteria, experimentation with different phages, couriers, and so forth, phages are shipped. Once the phages arrive in San Diego, the scientists must figure out where to administer them and at what dosage. To make a long story short, after nine months in the hospital, the phages did their job attacking the bacteria and the patient lived. Here are the phages attacking a bacterium.

Following the success of this experiment, the study of phages has been ramped up and the therapy has been used on a few other patients (Steffanie’s husband was the first in the US). Next time it could be you or me.

For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.