Phages have been, and are, being revisited and reconsidered.
The early days of 'phage therapy' were pretty bad - because we really didn't understand what was going on, the "purified" phage solutions still had bits of bacterial cell membranes and the like in them, including endotoxins. People died.
But phages were still being looked at for most of the antibiotic period, especially in countries without quite such widespread access to antibiotics. The Soviet Union had a very active program in Georgia, which was ongoing before the trouble there a few years back, I don't know the status of it now.
It's a promising avenue, and there's some decisive advantages phages have over antibiotics. But it's also quite hard, and right now we lack a generalizable form of phage therapy - it tends to be a bespoke solution to specific intractable cases. But the incentives might increase as antibiotics become less and less effective.
For awhile I wanted to work on phage research before I realized wet-lab Biology was not my forte.
The early days of 'phage therapy' were pretty bad - because we really didn't understand what was going on, the "purified" phage solutions still had bits of bacterial cell membranes and the like in them, including endotoxins. People died.
But phages were still being looked at for most of the antibiotic period, especially in countries without quite such widespread access to antibiotics. The Soviet Union had a very active program in Georgia, which was ongoing before the trouble there a few years back, I don't know the status of it now.
It's a promising avenue, and there's some decisive advantages phages have over antibiotics. But it's also quite hard, and right now we lack a generalizable form of phage therapy - it tends to be a bespoke solution to specific intractable cases. But the incentives might increase as antibiotics become less and less effective.
For awhile I wanted to work on phage research before I realized wet-lab Biology was not my forte.