Hip
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EDIT: A new more up-to-date thread on phage therapy is HERE.
Bacteriophage therapy (phage therapy for short) is a method of fighting bacterial infections using bacteriophages, which are viruses that specifically infect and kill bacteria, but are harmless to humans or animals.
Unlike antibiotics, phages only kill their specific bacterial targets. This precision targeting of bacteria might conceivably be of advantage in the case of gut dysbiosis (where pathogenic bacteria or fungi in the large intestine outnumber the beneficial bacteria), because phages can selectively kill the pathogenic bacteria, leaving the beneficial bacteria unharmed.
Phage therapy has a history of 100 years, and is still widely used in Russia, Georgia and Poland.
Bacteriophage therapy is available at the Phage Therapy Center in Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia, which is a private clinic.
The clinic has attracted hundreds of patients from Western Europe, the US, Canada and Australia who sought highly personalized and intensive, holistic treatment of infectious diseases that were considered untreatable within their own medical systems. Ref: 1
This clinic is a now subsidiary of PhageInternational, Inc, in California.
The cost of treatment from the Phage Therapy Center is $200 for the initial testing (selecting the phages), plus between $1,000 and $2,000 for the phages themselves, which are shipped to you (you just take these orally). So the total cost would be around $1,200 to $2,200. See this later post.
Another bacteriophage therapy clinic is the Eliava Phage Therapy Center, in Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia.
The cost of treatment by the Eliava Phage Therapy Center is €1900 which includes online consultation with doctor. Or if you want to be treated locally at the Eliava clinic, then the cost is €3900 for 7 to 14 days treatment. See here.
However, there seems to be a cheaper option: recently I became aware (thanks @Andey) of a large Russian online pharmacy called pharmalad.com which is geared up for sending items internationally to any part of the world, and which stocks a range of ready-made phage therapy products costing around $30 per box (each box contains 2 x 40 ml), plus $42 for international shipping. These phage therapy products can be taken orally or rectally.
EDIT 2020: Pharmalad no longer exists, but these phage therapy products can be bought here.
Pharmalad.com's list of phage therapy products includes the following phage treatments:
• Staphylococcus bacteria
• Klebsiella pneumonia
• Proteus mirabilis and Proteus vulgaris
• Pseudomonas
• Wide-spectrum phage therapy product that treats: Salmonella species, Escherichia coli, Proteus species, Enterococcus species, Staphilococcus species, Pseudomonas aeruginosa — manufacturer info and instructions for use here.
It's a good idea to use the Google Chrome browser to look at the above products, as this automatically translates pages to English (the above product pages are in Russian). Or you can use Google Translate with other browsers.
If you want to search for more phage therapy products on the pharmalad.com website, just enter the Russian word бактериофаг (= bacteriophage) into the search box on pharmalad.com.
In the case of the Staphylococcus phage product, each box contains 10 x 20 ml, and the instructions for adults say to take 20 to 30 ml orally one to three times a day, for 7 to 14 days. So if you took the lowest dose for 10 days, then just one box will suffice.
The pharmacy pharmday.org also stock some phage treatments.
Western phage products include: Nutrivee Advanced Prebiotic Formula and MRM, Probiotic Booster with Preforpro. which contain the phages LH01 Myoviridae, LL5 Siphoviridae, T4D Myoviridae, LL12 Myoviridae (most Western phage products seem to contain these same four phages; a comparison of Western phage products can be found here).
For anyone who has had a digestive stool analysis (or used uBiome.com) to determine the bacterial species in their intestines, they may possibly benefit from selecting a phage therapy from the above list which targets the pathogenic bacteria in their gut.
I believe the difference between the above ready-made phage therapy products and the phage therapy service provided by the Phage Therapy Center is that the latter has a wide stock of different phages, and if you send them a bacterial sample, they can select the best phages for targeting and killing your particular bacterial species and subspecies.
One thing to be concerned about with phage therapy is the possibility that too many pathogenic bacteria may be killed too quickly, leading to a release of bacterial toxins that cause a Herxheimer reaction.
I am considering buying some of these phage therapy products. I have IBS-D, and also, a stool analysis showed I have Staphylococcus aureus and Proteus mirabilis in my gut, which are both considered pathogenic if their populations get too large (according to my Genova Diagnostics stool test report).
Incidentally, for those with Lyme disease, note that the Phage Therapy Center said that: "there are no therapeutic phages for the Lyme-causing bacteria and therefore phage therapy would not be an appropriate treatment." Ref: 1
Although there are some researchers at the University of Leicester, UK, looking into bacteriophages for Borrelia. Ref: 1
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