Cold war politics hampered life-saving phage therapy research | Letters
Phage therapy (Girl is first patient saved by GM virus treatment, 9 May) has a long history, predating antibiotics, but has been largely confined to the (former) USSR since the 30s. As early as 1896, British bacteriologist Ernest Hankin discovered filterable antibacterial activity killing cholera in Ganges water and suggested the agent was responsible for limiting cholera epidemics; Fi(C)lix d'Herelle realised in 1916 that the activity was a bacteria-killing virus. However, two commissioned reviews from the US contradicted d'Herelle - wrongly - and research in the west was largely abandoned, especially as antibiotics arrived. In the Soviet east, progress on phage therapy continued - after all, you can collect new strains in a jamjar on a piece of string dipped in the Moscow river - published in Russian, but many western scientists didn't read the research and wouldn't trust it if they did. Honourable exceptions include successful preclinical studies on animals in the 80s in the UK, but the overall conclusion is that politics interfered to hamper the development of life-saving new therapies.
David Hanke
Swaffham Bulbeck, Cambridgeshire
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