Turns out, the first person to be successfully treated for a bacterial infection with phage therapy was 100 years ago. I knew from my college days that bacteriophages, or phages, were viruses that had naturally evolved to attack bacteria, but I didn’t know that they’d been used therapeutically. Q: How did you come across bacteriophage in your research, and how did it help Tom? Why did it fall out of use?Ī: When it was clear that Tom was dying and even the top doctors at UC San Diego couldn’t save him, I started researching alternatives on the internet. By 2050, 10 million people per year will die from antimicrobial resistance - that’s one person every three seconds - unless urgent action is taken. It’s a global problem, and it’s getting worse. That has led to widespread antibiotic resistance among bacteria in people and animals and remains the most important source of antimicrobial resistance today. In fact, about 70 percent of antibiotics are used in agriculture, and some of these are the same antibiotics used to treat people. Along the way, it was discovered that when they were given to livestock, they’d grow fatter, faster. New superbugs soon followed, partly because antibiotics aren’t just used to treat human infections. The first superbug - methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA - appeared in the early 1960s and soon it spread all over the world. Antibiotics worked so well they were hailed as wonder drugs. The first classes of antibiotics that were developed were broad spectrum, meaning they killed many kinds of bacteria, so they were prescribed liberally, often before a diagnosis was made. At the time, most people believed that all we needed to do to keep ahead of multi-drug resistance was to keep developing new antibiotics. Soon after the first antibiotic, penicillin, was introduced in the early 1940s, it was discovered that bacteria could develop resistance to it. Bacteria can also acquire antibiotic resistance genes from other microorganisms. Q: Why has antibiotic resistance become a problem in medicine?Ī: Bacterial resistance to antibiotics occurs naturally through genetic mutations since they typically multiply every 20 to 30 minutes. We are known for our research on HIV among marginalized populations in Tijuana, Mexico, where we’ve worked together for many years. I’m an infectious disease epidemiologist and associate dean of global health, but I’m not a medical doctor.
Q: Can you please describe your and Tom’s professional background?Ī: Tom and I are both professors at UC San Diego in the School of Medicine. Navy, San Diego State University and others for Patterson’s survival against the odds.
The UC San Diego medical community joined forces with the U.S. In their new book “The Perfect Predator: A Scientist’s Race to Save Her Husband from a Deadly Superbug,” the co-authors retrace how Patterson’s life hung in the balance at the UC San Diego’s intensive care unit as Strathdee researched a forgotten treatment for antibiotic-resistant superbugs. At first, his superbug was resistant to 15 antibiotics, but by the time he was medevacked back home to the UC San Diego hospital, it was fully resistant. The World Health Organization considered Tom’s superbug to be one of the nastiest on the planet.
Superbugs are bacteria that are resistant to multiple antibiotics. “A superbug had made its home inside the abscess in his abdomen. “It wasn’t until we were medevacked to a hospital in Germany several days later that we learned that pancreatitis was the least of Tom’s problems,” Strathdee continued. It’s very painful - 50 percent of people with it die, even without complications.”
That triggered pancreatitis, which is inflammation of the pancreas. It caused a giant abscess the size of a small football to form in his abdomen. We didn’t know it at the time, but Tom had a gallstone that became lodged in his bile duct. “I joked that he might see King Tut feet first in his own tomb and felt terrible when his condition turned serious. “Tom’s symptoms resembled food poisoning at first, but he just kept getting sicker,” said Steffanie Strathdee, his wife and an associate dean of global health and infectious disease epidemiologist at UC San Diego. While vacationing in Egypt during the winter of 2015, an almost fatal event occurred to local resident and UC San Diego professor Thomas Patterson.