4 ms·
The bar has certainly been met with regards to phage as a food additive: http://www.fda.gov/OHRMS/DOCKETS/98fr/cf0559.pdf http://www.fda.gov/OHRMS/DOCKETS/98fr/
by bhickey 13y ago
The bar has certainly been met with regards to phage as a food additive: http://www.fda.gov/OHRMS/DOCKETS/98fr/cf0559.pdf http://www.fda.gov/OHRMS/DOCKETS/98fr/cf0559.pdf
The error rate of an E.coli DNA polymerase in vitro in <9x10^-6. Lambda phage, for example, has a genome that's about 48 kilobases in length. Which gives a mean error rate of 0.432 bases / replication. Ballpark estimate that the phage goes through 30 replications to produce a plaque, so we're talking ~13 mutations (it's a little different than that due to the founder effect, etc).
It isn't like a phage is going to jump Kingdoms and start predating you instead of the preferred host. This simply isn't a realistic risk, while the immunogenicity issues could be.
In terms of my own risk tolerance, I would have been comfortable drinking any of my own samples.
- tsotha 13y ago>In terms of my own risk tolerance, I would have been comfortable drinking any of my own samples. Hmmmm. Maybe so, but would you inject them?
- bhickey 13y agoIf there was a medical need and they were shown to be efficacious, sure. I'm currently receiving allergy shots which involves frequent injections of dust mites. Injections are followed by a 30 minute observation period as a caution against anaphylaxis. Staff are on hand to intubate. The frequency of life threatening reactions is around 1 in 10^6. If phage were ever used clinically, I suspect the protocol would be similar. I mean, heck, some people have life threatening reactions to common antibiotics (I believe sulfa allergies are particularly common), but that doesn't keep them out of use.