Many, many MDs, NDs, DCs and every kind of healer are subscribed to this newsletter. Over the years, I’ve befriended a few and among many things that I’ve learned from you is that besides modern allopathic medicine and the well-known traditional Chinese, Ayurvedic and other ancient folk medicines from every continent, there is also the very distinctive Russian medicine, which is basically modern medicine without the overbearing influence of Big Pharma.

Tbilisi, the capital city of Georgia in the Caucasus region of Eurasia may seem like an unlikely place to be on the cutting edge of a treatment for antibiotic-resistant infections but it has become a center for phage therapy because this century-old treatment was only ever approved for use on humans in the former Soviet Union, far away from the purview of Big Pharma.

The quandary around phage therapy in the West is a perfect illustration of how corporatism impedes medicine. Phage is short for bacteriophage, a kind of virus that is the most plentiful form of life on our planet. Although “good” viruses have been found for the treatment of bacterial infections in the former Soviet Union and even at Yale University, this modality is completely outside of FDA guidelines. In certain emergencies, American patients are granted permission to receive phage therapy but their use remains little-known in the West because you can’t patent and market a naturally-occurring virus.

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria kill 23,000 people every year in the United States and the UN estimates that by 2050, more people will die from antibiotic-resistant infections than currently die from cancer. The American scientists interviewed here weigh in on how push will come to shove with the FDA in our post-antibiotic era.

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Alexandra Bruce

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