3 ms·

But new phage strains would evolve head to head with the resistant bacteria, right? With antibiotics you have a fixed molecule, which becomes useless if the bac

• t_mann 4y ago
  That's the classical argument pro phages. It's probably not easy to pick a clearly better one, @yyyk seems to have more insight than I do, but I did read an article pointing out that research on bacteriophages in the west only really took off after the cold war.
• yyyk 4y ago
  Yes, but you can't rely on that on a natural setting. Sometimes the body does get rid of a disease, right? Same thing with bacteria-phage relationship - and the resistant bacteria can then spread (while the better phages are difficult to harvest back from the body, and may not be as effective against the original strain). I think a more personalized medical system can do a lot of good with phages given modern tech, but most medical provision systems would have difficultly deploying it, and certainly no one was able to back when it was developed. AFAIK, the ability to easily scale, transport and deploy antibiotics was what led to antibiotics being chosen over phages just about everywhere.