Phage Therapy

[Guest guest]

Hi, everyone, this is my first post and I would like to thank

everyone involved at Pecanbread for their info and advice. I am

about to start my daughter on the SCD but she has hypoglycaemia and

is tube fed, so this is going to be very complex and difficult. Her

behaviour becomes worse when certain oral foods are given and also

when her feed down her tube is increased, which is a concern as she

needs extra calories for weight gain. I imagine I will be posting

messages her quite a lot over the next few months!!

Anyway I wanted to know if anyone had looked into something called

phage therapy. This is not widely available. It is an alternative

to antibiotics and works by introducing a phage virus which targets

and " bursts " certain bacterias, without damaging human tissue or

other harmless bacteria. There are phage cocktails which

specifically treat gastrointestinal conditions such as enterocolitis

and these phages target such bacteria as klebsiella, e-coli, candida

infections and, I think, clostridia, all of which seem to be a

problem in autistic spectrum conditions. Evergreen, a University at

Washington are researching into this, and there is a clinic in Russia

who are already using phage therapy as a treatment for antibiotic

resistant bacteria. When I typed in phage therapy into the search

engine I got some really interesting sites and thought I would

mention this therapy here as gut bugs seem to cause so much trouble.

Maybe in years to come this might be a viable treatment for our kids,

though the die-off effect may be a nasty side effect.

Regards

Glynis Steele