I superbatteri they are one of the biggest threats of the future. Already in 2019 statistics, the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention defined them as an “urgent threat to global public health” with 5 million people killed worldwide. But now those predictions have become even more dire.
INSIGHTS
“It is estimated that by 2050, 10 million people per year – or one person every three seconds – will die from a superbug infection,” the infectious disease epidemiologist said Steffanie Strathdeeco-director of the first dedicated phage therapy center in North America, the Center for Innovative Phage Applications and Therapeutics , or IPATH, at the UC San Diego School of Medicine.
The duration and the infections
Severe cases of antibiotic-resistant eye infections began appearing in May 2022. By the following January, the CDC said at least 50 patients in 11 states had developed superbug infections after using preservative-free artificial tears. By May 2023, the outbreak had spread to 18 states: four people died, four others lost their vision, 14 suffered vision loss, and dozens more infections elsewhere in the body.
“Only a handful of patients actually had eye infections, which made the outbreak incredibly difficult to resolve,” said epidemiologist Dr. Maroya Walters, who led the CDC’s artificial tears investigation. The culprit was a rare strain of Pseudomonas aeruginosa drug resistant that had never been identified in the United States before the outbreak.
Pseudomonas aeruginosa, alarm over the super bacterium that causes eye infections: deaths and loss of sight in the USA
Microscopic war
But thanks to evolution, the billions of bacteria in the world today have a natural enemy: tiny viruses called bacteriophages. Each set of phages is uniquely designed to find, attack, and devour a specific type of pathogen. “Each bacterial species, or even the genotypes within it, can have a whole repertoire of phages attacking it, using a wide variety of methods to enter and debilitate the bacterial cell,” said Paul Turner, professor of ecology and biology evolutionary at the University of Washington.
Yale University and a member of the microbiology faculty at the Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut.
To maximize success, the specialists they seek out a variety of phages to take on a particularly harmful superbug, sometimes creating a cocktail of microscopic warriors that can hopefully continue the attack when one is neutralized.
That’s what happened in 2016 to Strathdee’s husband, Tom Patterson, retired professor of psychiatry at UC San Diego. Due to an infection with “Iraqibacter,” a drug-resistant bacterium found in the sands of Iraq, Patterson was suffering from multiple organ failure and was near death. In a race against time, Strathdee overcame incredible obstacles to find and deliver several purified phage cocktails to Patterson’s doctors. One of those cocktails contained a phage that “scared the bacteria so much that it dropped the outer capsule,” said Strathdee, associate dean of global health sciences at UC San Diego. «He was more afraid of the phage than the antibiotic and this allowed the antibiotic to work again».
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