Bob Barney Broadcast:Phage treatment-Super bug killer
Bob Barney: Phage treatment-Super bug killer
Hi, this is Bob Barney for The Plain Truth Today, brought to you by theplaintruth.com, and one of the subjects we talk about constantly on The Plain Truth Today’s commercials that we promote ourselves is our website part of theplaintruth.com that you can go to every day. It’s called Your Health Today, and we try to stay on the cutting edge on the biblical diet and what God wants you to eat that just simply most people in America and the Western world are not familiar with, and the Bible is full of what you should eat and what you should not eat and how to stay healthy, but also we try to stay on Your Health Today on the cutting edge medicine that is breaking barriers that is just not discussed, and I was surprised with my own problem, and I’m getting into this a little bit right now before I play this story, it’s about 22 minutes long, about my own experience in having a bacterial infection that was resistant to almost every known bacteria or antibiotic, and I was on two or three oral antibiotics trying to fight this infection. I had a major urine infection that was brought on by a surgery that I had, an elective surgery at that, and I spent two to three weeks absolutely in a lot of problems with a bacterial infection that would not go away.
I had to use catheters, and it was just a mess, and then finally I found an infectious disease specialist doctor who happened to be five steps away from my urologist who came to the rescue. I had to put what would they call a PICC, P-I-C-C, you can look that up, in my arm where my wife three times a day had to inject a brand new not resistant antibiotic that you had to inject into your bloodstream, and this catheter that went through my arm all the way up to my heart where the medicine would take effect and get through your whole system, and that took two weeks to even get in control of the bacterial infection that I had. During that time I decided to do some of my own research because not even this infectious disease doctor that I was going to, and she’s verygood and very knowledgeable, had no idea of something called phage treatment, and that isgoing to probably be the cutting edge solution to bacterial infections that simply are not cured byantibiotics anymore, and there’s a reason for that, and the reason I’m going to simply say right now is because everything we eat, the water we drink, is just filled with antibiotics.
They did a study of sharks in the Atlantic Ocean, and they had Viagra in their systems, they had antibiotics in their system, and this is in the Atlantic Ocean, so basically we are consuming antibiotics every day from animal sources, from plant sources, and from our water, especially on public water systems, and what happens there is your body is becoming immune to these antibiotics, and when you have a very resistant bacterial infection, almost nothing works, and I found this story about a woman from the University of California, San Diego, whose husband had similar what I had, but it broke out of the urinary tract and into the bloodstream and causing sepsis, and the man was in a coma and was about ready to die because once you have sepsis with certain bacterial infections, there’s almost no treatment for it. That kind of scared me, and that’s why I started to do some research just in case this last-ditch effort of this antibiotic that was injected in me wouldn’t work, and I came across this University of California professor, she’s an MD in San Diego, and she had a husband that was in a coma, and she did some research and found out there was a man, and I forgot what country he’s in, and maybe I just forgot right now, but he was studying the bacteria that is found in sewers, in septic tanks in sewers, and to his surprise, he found that for every bacterial strain known to man, and there are tens of thousands of them, there was a virus that specifically ate that bacteria in that septic system. Think about that, and when it ate it and ate all there is to it, it would die, so there was no side effects, so she contacted the man, he asked her what strain her husband had, she told him, and he gave her the virus that would eat it.
She gave it to her husband, I’m not sure if it was injected or some other way, and within two days, he was out of his coma, and within four days, I believe, he was out of the hospital, and he was cured, and the neat thing about this treatment is the virus that you enter into your body never causes your body any harm, because it can only live as long as that bacteria is alive, so once it eats it all, it dies, and this is a story about phage therapy. No matter how much you treat the Zuber bug, it will never go away. A looming epidemic threatens millions.
We need to be bold, we need to take risks. I want it to live, doesn’t it worry everyone? It should worry everyone. Is Avis Favreau.
Welcome to W5. The word super bug should worry us all. They are antibiotic resistant bacteria that cause infections which are pretty well impossible to beat, but now there may be hope from a long forgotten Canadian discovery using viruses found all around us, even in sewage, to target bacteria and to stop infections dead.
You’re looking at microscopic killers, bacteria that cause infections that are tough, sometimesimpossible to kill, even with the most powerful antibiotics. These super bugs are a growing threatto our health. Already they kill some 700,000 people around the world every year, and they nearly ended the life of Tom Patterson.
I’ve been at death’s door. I’ve seen what it is to be close to death. His stunning recovery, thanks to his Canadian-born scientist wife, Stephanie Strathdee, who resurrected a 100-year-old treatment discovered in Canada to save Tom and perhaps other lives throughout the world.
If we can do this for one man, we can do it for the planet. Their story begins in 2015 when Tom, a professor of psychiatry, and Stephanie, a long-time AIDS researcher, were on a trip in Egypt. After a meal, Tom came down with what everyone thought was food poisoning.
An hour later, I woke up, and I was throwing up like you wouldn’t have believed, and Steph is like, you know, you got food poisoning, no big deal. And then it got worse. It got way worse.
When he started complaining of back pain, that’s when I realized that this really doesn’t look like food poisoning, and we need to get him some help. Airlifted to a hospital in Frankfurt, Germany, the doctors diagnosed something far more sinister. Tom was infected with a deadly superbug called Acinetobacter baumannii.
And the doctor said there’s a giant abscess in his abdomen the size of a small football, and the doctor picked up this flask, and he was showing me this murky brown putrid fluid. You know, scientist, when you saw that murky brown liquid, what did you think? I knew that that meant that there was some bacteria that was growing inside the cyst in his abdomen, but I figured, well, there’s antibiotics that are going to cure that. Tom was airlifted back to the U.S. and to the University of California San Diego Health Center, where infectious disease specialist Dr. Robert Schooley took on the case.
When did you get worried? It was clear that we had uncontrolled infection. Did you think you might lose him? There were many times we thought that was quite possible, yeah. He’d fallen prey to one of the most frightening scenarios, spreading bacteria that had developed resistance to allknown antibiotics, and was now in a coma.
This organism that was living inside this abscess in his abdomen was resistant to all antibiotics. There wasn’t a single antibiotic left in modern medicine’s arsenal to kill it. By that time, he had been on a respirator for some time.
He was nearly comatose from systemic effects of the infection. He was on three different medications to maintain a blood pressure. His kidneys were failing, and he was beginning to develop liver failure, so he was developing multi-organ failure.
You know, it’s hard to predict how long he would live, but it would have been inevitable if something would have pushed him over the edge. What was going through your head at this point? I guess I just didn’t realize that he was dying a little bit more each day, until I heard a colleague of mine on the phone make a comment when he thought I’d hung up, and he said, has anybody told Steph that her husband is going to die? I cradled the phone in my arms, and I thought, no, nobody has. And I realized, wow, like, they just don’t want to tell me.
In hospital for months with no medical options left, she asked Tom for a sign. I took his hand, and I said, honey, I know that you’ve been fighting really hard, and that you’re really tired. So if you want to live, I need to know.
And if you could squeeze my hand, tell me that you want to live, I will leave no stone unturned.And about a minute later, he squeezed my hand really hard. You wanted to communicate something to her.
Yes. What? I wanted to live. And I just fist pumped my, you know, blue-gloved hand in the air, and I thought, yes! And then I thought, oh, crap, what do I do now, you know? Like, I’m not a medical doctor.
So Stephanie launched an urgent search, recalling something she’d learned back as a student at the University of Toronto, a story about viruses that eat bacteria. They’re called phages. 100 times smaller than bacteria, they find and lock on to specific bacteria, inject their DNA to produce more phages, so many that the bacteria explodes, and billions of these new phages are released to repeat the cycle.
That’s pretty cool. Huh. And I sat back and I thought, I wonder if we could get these phages to treat Tom’s infection.
But phages have been largely off the radar for Western medicine since they were discovered over 100 years ago by a French-Canadian scientist, Félix D’Erel. He used phages to treat some patients with dysentery and typhoid plague. But antibiotics were easier to make and more profitable,sending phages to the fringes of the scientific world.
But as Tom lay dying in his hospital room, Stephanie and the doctors took a chance on that phage therapy. Where they’re from is the crazy part. Where you go to find phages is where you have a lot of bacteria.
So the perfect place to find them is in sewage. And that’s exactly what you’ll find here in the labs at UC San Diego, where Dr. David Pride, Associate Director of the Clinical Microbiology Lab, has long been fascinated by these neglected phages and has been collecting them for his own research. From sewage.
From sewage. That would make people a little squeamish. Well, it probably shouldn’t.
And it probably shouldn’t because phages are absolutely everywhere. You can look in the water, you can look on surfaces, you can look in any different part of the body, and they’re absolutely teeming with bacteriophages. The quest was to find the exact strain of phages that would kill Tom’s infections.
A process of trial and error, so phages are extracted and purified and then tested in a dish. We’ll put a drop of them on a plate, we’ll mark where we dropped them, and we look to see is there any evidence that the bacteria is being killed by that bacteriophage. And how do you know? Well, it clears.
So the entire plate is cloudy. Where you see that it’s clear means that that bacteria has been killed. So when we find that clearance, we know that our phage is capable of killing that bacteria.
The team working on Tom’s case found several phages they thought would work against his infection when all antibiotics had failed. Okay, here we are, we’re having Megan administer phage therapy. And then they injected billions of phages into his abdomen, even right into his bloodstream, with no guarantees it would work.
That was the scariest moment when I had to sign this consent form that I knew my husband was dying, I knew we were going to try an experimental unproven cure that could kill him, but I’m going to do it anyway because, you know, it’s like… What choice did you have? Yeah, there was none. He was literally within hours of dying, I was told. When did you notice a change? We started the phage therapy on March 15th of 2016.
On March 20th, Tom woke up, lifted his head off the pillow, and kissed his daughter’s hand, and everybody freaked out. Within five days, Tom was up, starting to walk, and soon strong enough to thank his medical team. So do you want to say something to those doctors who worked around the clock? Oh my God, it’s up and down.
I haven’t seen it, I haven’t thought, because we’re in love. He said they’re going to save millions of lives because of their work. Many credit the phages for saving his life.
My favorite line is now that my husband was cured with phage therapy, I can literally say he’s full of shit. Did it occur to you that this was a historic case? I’m a skeptical, cynical person, and one of the things you don’t want to do is jump up and down and say, Eureka, now we have discovered the key to all multidrug-resistant bacterial infections. When what you really had was a guy who got lucky, but I was elated to see it, I thought this could be something really big.
Dance for us, Tom. With Tom now back to good health, he and Stephanie are on a mission to start testing phages in more patients to see if they are indeed a new way to beat superbugs. It’s clear that antibiotics are not the solution to this problem, and if you’ve been given life like I have, what are you going to do? You’ve got to give back, and that’s what we’re trying to do.
It makes you emotional? Absolutely. I feel like, how can you be so close to death and then just walk away from it? It’s an opportunity for me to give back to the world. And that’s part of the story.
We’re going to have one other thing here quickly after this real quick commercial break for your health today. I’ll be right back. Hi, Bob Barney for ThePlainTruth.com. When you go to ThePlainTruth.com, you will see a little button up there for Your Health Today, and you click on that, you’re going to find stories I don’t think you’re going to find in one place anywhere else in this world.
We go out looking for the stories of God’s miraculous cures, and a lot of that has to do with the diet you follow. God gives you, back in the Old Testament, you know, the part of the Bible that no Christian basically reads? The Old Testament has a lot of good things in there, not just the Ten Commandments, but it’s got a lot of laws that we think we’re done away with it or not. And one of those is the dietary laws, what you should eat, what you should not eat.
For example, God says it’s abhorrent to eat pork. It’s abhorrent to eat shellfish. And in fact, if you don’t eat animals that have cloven hooves and chew their cud, i.e. venison, beef, lamb, goat, then you’re not eating a clean, a biblically clean diet.
And it’s actually a sin against God’s laws. And God puts the laws here to help us, not to be, do not do this. It is to help us.
What we try to do with your health today is show you all the breaking, modern things going on that simply you’re not aware of, and maybe treatments are out there that are just being overlooked by big pharma, big medicine, and big government. I’ll be right back with the story, continuing. And we’re back with this phage therapy that I think is a revolutionary discovery.
I searched it out because of my own problem, because I was getting worried that I had a super bug that was going to come and do me in. And luckily, the antibiotic that I was on worked. I don’t know if it will work forever, but I’m going to know a lot more about phage therapy.
Right now, the University of California, San Diego, is leading the research. They have done 82 cases since 2021, up until December of 2025. And they have cured all 82 cases of antibacterial resistant drugs.
And this is just a remarkable thing. And then I found out from my, and I’m going to look into this,and I have a very good regular doctor. He’s an integrative medicine MD.
And I’m going to look in because now I found out the University of Virginia, which is about a three-hour drive from me, is now in phage therapy research. And they are doing experiments, and they are going to be probably on the East Coast, maybe a leading university in this new antibiotic replacement therapy. And I have one other thing I want to play, and then I’ll wrap it up.
When antibiotics came about, it really was seen as a set of wonder drugs, and they were.Suddenly, we had this drug arsenal that we could use to prevent mortality in humans worldwide.So the problem was that we didn’t anticipate that if you exposed bacteria to antibiotics in a very widespread way, you’re going to exert what’s called selection pressure.
Bacteria can evolve very, very quickly. Under the right conditions, they undergo multiple generations in a single day. So bacteria are growing, and if they mutate, they can evolve to be better resistant to antibiotics that they’re encountering in the environment.
And this is what has led to the current antibiotic resistance crisis. Pseudomonas aeruginosa is a very mobile bacteria. And by the way, this is the bacteria that I had, the one they were talking about.
Now, I can’t pronounce it, but this is the one that I had, and why I got quite worried. And it’s exceedingly common on Earth. Maybe we’re swimming in the lake, or even the ocean, and then suddenly, you get a bacterial infection.
It has many worrisome features. So it has all these little structures around the surface that look like tiny hairs, and these are called killi. And then they also have something called flagella.
They’re almost like a whipping tail that helps the bacteria move quickly through liquids. Worse yet, they have very efficient ways of removing antibiotics from the cell if they get in. These are called efflux pumps.
Antibiotics that make it inside of that cell. These efflux pumps allow the bacteria to actively pump the antibiotics out. Over the course of a chronic infection with a bacterium like pseudomonas aeruginosa, this could lead to organ failure.
And this can unfortunately lead to patient mortality. We’re running out of options for antibiotics to use in the clinic. I really got interested in the old idea of phage therapy.
So a phage is literally a virus of bacteria. Phages have been known for a long period of time. In roughly 1917, Felix Durell, who was the discoverer of phages, he saw that there was something that was capable of killing bacteria very efficiently.
So phages come in many flavors. And some of the most interesting ones look almost like a lunar lander. These phages, they’re kind of like predators.
They’ll come into a bacterial cell and make it into basically a production factory for baby phages.And then they’ll explode the cell. And they’ll go and infect other bacterial cells.
And as I studied that, I thought, well, so it’s literally possible to use phages to kill the bacteria that we’re particularly worried about. So modern day phage therapy really rests upon one thing, and that is phage discovery. That means that we often go out into the natural world to try and find the right ones.
So one of our favorite phages that we discovered early on when we did phage therapy, we abbreviated it as OMK01. And that stood for Outer Membrane Knockout 1. It was the first phage that we discovered that was specific to Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Again, what I had… So what we did was deploy this phage that’s going to attach to these efflux pumps, get into the bacterial cells, and kill them, because that’s what phages do.
In order to overcome that problem, we were predicting that the bacteria should evolve. And they should evolve in a particular predictable way. They should change so that that protein that the phages are binding to is no longer present.
And if that happened, they would remove the efflux pumps in order to solve the phage problem.So they may gain phage resistance and therefore withstand the therapy that we were deploying.But they would be suddenly vulnerable to antibiotics again, because those antibiotics could not be pushed out of the cell any longer.
That’s the double-edged sword. We kill it in the classic sense. But we don’t worry when the bacteria evolve resistance to phage attack, because it makes them automatically vulnerable to antibiotics.
What does that give us in the end? Antibiotics are wonderful, but they are chemical entities. They don’t change through evolution. And instead, phages have the power to do so.
So this is what we’re hoping to really tap into. Phages co-evolve and remain potent as killers of bacteria. And in this way, we’re not only using a new approach, we’re actually keeping existing drugs useful again in the clinic and in the hospital.
And that is the idea of the phage treatment. And I’m going to do more and more research on this and bring it to Your Health Today. I hope you go to Your Health Today at least two or three times a week.
We have usually three or four news stories, I’m sorry, a week on Your Health Today. Like I said, it’s cutting edge. We try to find things like how to stop prostate cancer.
There are many ways to stop prostate cancer that is unconventional, that actually medicine or doctors that, like I go to, who think out of the box, and they find natural remedies for a lot of things, and they also find just unique ways to fight things. And you find out that, for example,Ivermectin, for example, can kill many types of cancers because they’re parasitic derived in prostate and in other places like breast tissue and breast cancer. So that drug that everybody made fun of in COVID-19 not only helps against COVID-19, but it helps prevent certain cancers in the prostate, in the breast, and other places in the body.
We’re following that on Your Health Today. I really recommend that if you’re interested or if you have a problem with what’s going on, let us know what it is, and I’ll do all the research I possibly can for that, like I did for myself. And you’re going to find out there’s answers out there.
And there’s answers that are not coming from big pharma, because big pharma doesn’t make money on this kind of stuff. But in big medicine, basically, are just trying to make fast money and not necessarily trying to cure the patient. But there are people out there, like you just heard some,that have a godly motive.
If they’re godly or not, I’m just saying it’s a godly motive. It’s a spiritual motive to try to help humanity and find common enemies of the diseases that are plaguing the world. And that is our mission on ThePlainTruth.com, is to bring you the news that is important to you and your family.
And what’s in the Bible, by the way, is predictions. It’s yesterday’s headlines. It’s today’s headlines and tomorrow’s headlines.
And it will always be accurate. You know why? Because God made all of this stuff. There is a God.
It’s the God of the Bible. That’s what we’re trying to say. We are not a religious site.
We are a news site. But a news site without the knowledge of God, the true God, which is God the Father and Jesus Christ, that if you don’t have that in your news, you really have a worthless news site you’re going to. Because if you keep God out of it, then you’re keeping out the creator of us,the creator of this universe, and the creator of healing.
You know, one of the Hebrew names, I don’t have it on top of my head here, but one of the Hebrew names for God is the God of healing. Because you get healed by God. Sometimes by prayer, many times by prayer and by miracles.
But oftentimes God gives certain people the ability, scientists in this case, the ability to find natural causes and natural cures that God has already ordained since the creation of mankind or even animal kind. Think about that. It’s all found by understanding and believing in God and researching what is best for humanity.
And this is one of the treatments that I think is going to be in the newspapers a year, two, three, four, five years from now. You’re hearing it today on ThePlainTruth.com and Your Health Today.This is Bob Barney for ThePlainTruth.com and Your Health Today.
And these podcasts, The Plain Truth Today podcast that we do each and every day, three times a day on Monday through Friday, twice on the Sabbath day, which is Saturday and one show we always do on Sundays. And I hope you go there every day and I hope you come and see us, what we’re doing. And I hope you tell your friends about it because we are doing things you’re not gonna find.
And you know the nice thing, other than commercials for ThePlainTruth.com, you’re not gonna have drug commercials. You’re not gonna have wacky commercials when you try to watch the news at night and you’re not gonna be sold a bill of goods and you’re never gonna be asked for any money. We’re not asking for money.
This is free. It will always be free as long as I got the money to put into it. Until tomorrow, Bob Barney for ThePlainTruth.com saying thank you for listening.
Bye-bye.
