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Healthy

Common Cold

Stomach aches

Mild influenza

Food poisoning

Influenza

Dysentery

Influenza whilst immune compromised

Ebola

Spanish flu

[Bumber]

I'm thinking it's more "your immune system might destroy the phages", but I'm really not sure.

Which can also cause reactions like fever, etc. Not good if you're already weakened.

[Sheb]

Yeah. Yeah it is.

I should totally get a phage tatoo.

[scrdest]

Regarding teixobactin, it's important to keep in mind that resistance to any of those antibiotics is bound to become common at some points, because the resistance gene already exist in nature (in the bacteria producing the antibiotic, or in bacterias living in close assiociation with it.) once we start using it on a large scale, those genes will spread.

Uh.

There is.

And the widespread resistance is already extremely, extremely widespread. In fact, it forms a huge family of bacteria.

We call them 'Gram-Negative'.

Teixobactin specifically targets only Gram-Positive bacteria.

[Sheb]

Sure, but I'm willing to bet that somewhere out there, there is already a strain of Gram-positive bacteria resistant to teixobactin whose resistance gene is just waiting for sufficent evolutionary pressure to spread like wildfire.


_smartass

[Loud Whispers]

Sure, but I'm willing to bet that somewhere out there, there is already a strain of Gram-positive bacteria resistant to teixobactin whose resistance gene is just waiting for sufficent evolutionary pressure to spread like wildfire.


_smartass

Oi no micro-aggression

[scrdest]

Sure, but I'm willing to bet that somewhere out there, there is already a strain of Gram-positive bacteria resistant to teixobactin whose resistance gene is just waiting for sufficent evolutionary pressure to spread like wildfire.

smartass

Oi no micro-aggression

That better?

[Shadowlord]

The problem is that you typically can't be certain what pathogenic species are present inside a patient or wound, and that information is necessary for proper administration of phages.

Which is why people get an antibiotic prescription when they show up with symptoms that MIGHT be bacterial but would take days or more to test with what their doctors have, and needs to be treated asap if it IS bacterial (or maybe they have to send samples away, I don't know). That's the impression I get anyways as a person with no medical training whatosever. :V

[LordBucket]

It's very simple.

If it's effective, it's not alternative medicine. It's regular-ass medicine (not to be confused with regular ass-medicine, with which it has a degree of overlap).

Imagine that you're the CEO of a pharmaceutical company. You would like to fund a study. You have the choice to fund a study that will confirm/reject the usefulness of either:

A) An expensive drug that your company holds the patent to and that you can make a lot of money of if it works
B) A cheap, ubiquitous substance that you can't patent, and that if it works, anybody can bring to market

Even if the companies are honest, the simple fact of financial incentive tends to discourage certain types of research. That doesn't mean that everyone advertising his cureall for $5/bottle is genuine. But to assume that the companies making money off of you being sick are the grand holy sole and exclusive gateway to medicine is a mistake.

[Culise]

It's very simple.

If it's effective, it's not alternative medicine. It's regular-ass medicine (not to be confused with regular ass-medicine, with which it has a degree of overlap).

Imagine that you're the CEO of a pharmaceutical company. You would like to fund a study. You have the choice to fund a study that will confirm/reject the usefulness of either:

A) An expensive drug that your company holds the patent to and that you can make a lot of money of if it works
B) A cheap, ubiquitous substance that you can't patent, and that if it works, anybody can bring to market

Even if the companies are honest, the simple fact of financial incentive tends to discourage certain types of research. That doesn't mean that everyone advertising his cureall for $5/bottle is genuine. But to assume that the companies making money off of you being sick are the grand holy sole and exclusive gateway to medicine is a mistake.

B, because contrary to your premise, you actually can still patent the chemical itself once isolated, and a cheap, ubiquitous substance keeps manufacturing costs down - not to mention that if it's that easy to find, the race to the patent office will be neck-and-neck.  It's one of the reasons for the reason for one of the lesser-known pushes by pharmaceutical companies into older remedies.  For instance, the oft-reported promising preliminary results into fighting MRSA by using a "folk remedy" of wine, allium, and oxgall.  The key is to figure out from there if it was actually a viable, reproducible result, then isolate and determine what chemical process is occurring when the ingredients are combined is producing the desired effect.  That's what the difference between alternative and plain simple medicine is.  In a business as cutthroat as big pharma, they can't afford to let anything get by, not even if it's a little folksy. 

Heck, if they want, they can still sell it as homeopathic, all-natural herbal remedies, and a significant market segment will eat it up.  That may just be me being cynical, however.

[wierd]

The bigger issue, imho, is the stigma associated with testing folk remedies vs engineering synthetic molecules.

The latter is "cooler", and thus has bigger impact in research.  There's kind of a reason why all the in vitro studies I could find are published in no-name journals, typically associated with the aromatics industry (and thus intrinsically biased)

That doesnt fully disqualify the studies, it just means that more than one source is needed for good credulity.

Researchers need to pay the bills too. To do that, they need to be considered credible, and to have that, the research they do must be percieved as rigorous and valuable.  In academics, the research with the biggest impact rating is the most valuable to the researcher.

Thus, more researchers want to research novel synthetics, than those wanting to study how effective boiled plants are.

Likewise, there is bias in the grant awarding process against as well.

The result is that the testing that does get done, is the least expensive testing possible. That tends to preclude more useful kinds of studies, like the in vivo studies sheb was asking for.

[Sheb]

Yeah, for all the evil big pharma does, it's nice to remember than even in the US, about half the drug research money is government money.

[Radio Controlled]

I'm thinking it's more "your immune system might destroy the phages", but I'm really not sure.

Ding ding ding, a cookie for the man with the beard!

But yes, it's both 'your body reacts to the viral 'infection' and gives further inflammation, and is distracted from fighting the real infection' and secondary immune response building so you create antibodies against the phage, leading to a case of the host body becoming 'immune' for the cure.

At a guess, the 'They might attack our bodies!' thing which is pretty nonsensical, given the massive difference, both genetically and physically between bacteria and human cells.

You wound me, sir.

[That Wolf]

Oh sorry I almost forgot.
The title is, Homeopathetic cures book one: snakeoils, holy waters, handstands the cures to what ails you.
You can find at any decent book store or i-tunes.
Are you serious?! Just dont get sick. Wear a mask and carry around a silver sword or a gun and purify the sick, its how the imperium does it and it works.

As bacteria talks to itself it launches its chemical attack. Stop the talking stop the damage and im sure all bacteria types use the same chemical signature to talk but im not sure

[wierd]

uh, no.

Typically, it is the germ's waste products that are toxic. In some cases, it is the germ eating up all the nutritional energy from its host cell.  Typically, the chemical communication that germs use basically boils down to sniffing each other's urine. In some cases though, they communicate plasmids using a cytoplasmic bridge structure.

In all cases though, about the only way to "just stop that" is to kill them, and the messages they send each other are radically varied and diverse.

[Starver]

In all cases though, about the only way to "just stop that" is to kill them, and the messages they send each other are radically varied and diverse.

And there's a perfectly viable set of stories to explain how this all happened...

1) A bacterium that reacts differently according to the density of population of its sister bacterium is an advantage.  (Work as an individual when relatively alone, work as a film when dominating the environment, etc.)

2) The easiest chemical signal to give some kind of density are chemicals that the her sisters are already expelling (doesn't need to spontaneously create a new signal-molecule creation mechanism).

3) The subtleties of "are those my sisters or some of my cousins' sisters" is useful to know, once local competition becomes such that consobricide may be necessary, but not at the expense of sororicide, so ever more subtle hints of compounds unique to direct relations become key triggers in different branches of the cellular tree.

And so, for millions of years, these mechanisms have refined themselves (including refining themselves to make change and adaptation of the first-order event ever easier), through a drunkard's-walk of all possible biochemical processes, so that working solutions thrive and beget more working solutions, and the best we can do is to go in heavy-handed and identify the broad brush-strokes of such mechanisms and occasionally drop a whole truckload of anvils on the vague area of the small nut we're actually trying to crack.  It's almost a miracle we've got any handhold on the situation.  Certainly there's no panacea, nor a carefully-fashioned nutcracker for each and every type of nut we're encountering.

One day, however, just maybe there'll be more advanced methods of fingerprinting a bacterium's signals and synthesising something (either as a blocker or a 'fake safe' that equally messes up the process)