mrsa

Using living organisms to combat human disease is nothing new to medicine. The Greeks used leeches to balance the humors (didn't work). Civil war medics used maggots to clean dead tissue from wounds (did work, and is still selectively used today). The next step in fighting infection with outside help looks to come from the bacteriophages, which are viruses that only infect bacteria.

Weve been talking a lot lately about bacterial resistance to drugs, most specifically as bacteria approach the limits of our treatments of last resort. As a consequence of the diminishing returns on traditional families of antibiotics, scientists have turned their focus to more novel approaches for combating infection. The work has been aimed at better understanding the interaction between our immune system and particular bacterial strains. Most recently, a team of researchers at the University of Washington have discovered just how the common staph infection resists our defenses.