Argh, my comment is incredibly confused... partly because I wrote it at 1am after a long day. Macrophage = bacteriophage, and they attack bacteria, not viruses

Argh, my comment is incredibly confused... partly because I wrote it at 1am after a long day. Macrophage = bacteriophage, and they attack bacteria, not viruses. 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. I wonder if virophages, as a potential avenue for treatment, will run into the same issues... I suppose the difference here is that we don't yet have good treatments for many different types of viral infection.