“Phages” are little known outside the former countries of the Soviet Union, which did the most to develop the idea.

The Eliava Institute uses them as living antibiotics, hoping to cure a human’s disease by causing one in the bacteria making him sick. These are viruses that infect and kill bacteria.

He travelled to the Eliava Institute in Tbilisi, Georgia, one of a handful of institutions specialising in the study of bacteriophages. With antibiotics unable to cure his illness, Mr Rud took a chance. One estimate, published in the Lancet in 2022, reckons antibiotic resistance directly caused 1.2m deaths in 2019, and was indirectly implicated in 3.8m more. Some infections, including gonorrhoea and tuberculosis, are once again becoming difficult to treat. It has been almost 40 years since a new class of antibiotics has been made available to patients. At the same time, much of the pharmaceutical industry has lost interest in finding new ones. Repeated exposure to a lethal threat has led bacteria to evolve resistance to many existing antibiotics, blunting their efficacy. They have drastically reduced the risks of surgery (patients often died from infections caught on the surgeon’s table) and chemotherapy, which destroys the patient’s immune system.īut their magic is waning. A class of “silver bullet” drugs that destroy disease-causing bacteria while sparing the patient’s own cells, they have defanged all sorts of once-feared illnesses, from cholera to syphilis.

Antibiotics are among medicine’s most spectacular achievements. Mr Rud’s experience illustrates a growing problem-and one possible solution to it.

The Unfortunate Victim by Greg Pyers