Ok, another naive question: Not suggesting we just eat a bunch of bacteriophages, but why wouldn't studying phage mechanisms / proteins for killing bacteria be equally useful?
I'm sure people are studying them. But as GP said, antibiotic are lazy. A doctor would much rather prescribe an antibiotic than do the work to match the specific bacterial infection with the particular phage to deal with it.
And since antibiotics still work (for now), there's not all that much money in phage research. If we do get to the point where we "run out" of antibiotics due to bacterial resistance, I imagine phage research will become a lot more attractive as a destination for research funding.
They're viruses, so they work by infecting bacteria and making the bacteria create more of itself.
Antibiotics are found by isolating a compound some i.e. fungi naturally produces. We figure out how to produce the compound and don't fill people with fungi to produce it. Bacteriophages are already the analogy to the compound itself.
So we should be investing heavily in creating and distributing all variety of bacteriophage for all our common bacterial infections. 20k deaths/year from MRSA in the USA alone, 120k infections/year in USA and many of the survivors are left with life-long complications.
We need to implement it! Steffanie Strathdee could save her husband's life because she was the director of UC San Diego’s Global Health Institute. "Regular" people deserve to live too.
