Phages coming to the Surface... at a sewerage near you!

Great to see the world is waking up to Bacteriophage Therapy!

Just last week on SBS in Australia they showed a BBC program Michael Mosley versus The Superbugs. It explained the problem we have with Antibiotic Resistant bacteria infecting and killing us and how expensive and difficult it is to find new antibiotics. If you are in Australia have a look, and fast forward to minute 50 to get to the phage bit. Watch:  www.sbs.com.au

But really, the best coverage on Phages was on this fantastic documentary which,.... is in Dutch. Just got a call from a friend in Holland to urge me to look into Phage therapy! Well, yeah!
Watch: Dokters van Morgen

Here is some info from the Dokters van Morgen doco;

Dutch people are going to Georgia (former USSR), Poland and Belgium for Phage treatment because it is not available in Holland, despite research done at Dutch academic institutions. A recent petition in Holland presented 40,000 signatures to the Dutch parliament demanding Phage Therapy to be allowed! In the USA the FDA allows phage therapy to be used in case by case situations but usually only in end-of-life situations. Those cases are well documented and mostly have positive outcomes. In Georgia, phage therapy goes back 100+ years and in Poland 70+ years, all have detailed studies, books, papers and even recent peer review trials, none of which are accepted by the Dutch RIVM (National Institute for Public Health and the Environment).

The program explains how phage therapy in the West was dropped in favour of Antibiotics because phage therapy only targeted one bacteria at a time whereas Antibiotics offered one pill for all, and also assumes phage therapy is not explored because pharmaceutical companies are the ones that invest the 10s of millions of dollars required to do the clinical trials and get new medicine approved, but not for medicine they will not make a profit on. No one else has that sort of money to run the official trials needed to approve it. Besides, phages are abundant in this world and often the labs that study and isolate them just retrieve them from their local sewage system, their local rivers or any other bacteria-rich environments. Obviously not something a well respecting politician likes to hear.

In Poland and Georgia where phages are widely accepted as standard medicine and available by prescription for common infections, as normal as it is to get antibiotics. Commercial phage cocktails are sold in pharmacies for little money!

The documentary follows dutch patients to The Institute of Immunology and Experimental Therapy PAS in Wroclaw, in Poland, and to the

Andre Gorsky from the Polish Evergreen Phage Lab said they operate their lab in Poland, in the European Union (EU), with EU support, using EU approved protocols as outlined by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) is a decentralised agency of the European Union (EU) responsible for the scientific evaluation, supervision and safety monitoring of medicines in the EU, and cannot believe other countries do not recognise their decades of research, their peer-reviewed paper or  seem to accept that phage therapy saves lives. Andre says the EMA clearly allows phage therapy to be used in the EU where it is proven that other medicine has failed.

Back in the USA the UC San Diego Center for Innovative Phage Applications and Therapeutics, touted as the first phage therapy centre in North America, bringing innovative research and clinical practice to the field of medicine. There they treat with phage therapy on a case by case basis FDA approval process. Apparently, the phages used there come from a lab in Belgium, Europe!

Belgium; the Queen Astrid Military Hospital in Brussels and www.p-h-a-g-e.org have been instrumental in getting approval for phage therapy in Belgium, This means that as of last year a physician in Belgium can now prescribe phages to treat a patient, and a pharmacist can receive this prescription and prepare a tailor-made phage cocktail for that patient!

This Dutch lady is emotional because she was cured after 7 years battling and being told her bladder had to be removed.
She cannot believe the Dutch do not allow phages in Holland yet, letting people die and suffer unnecessarily!

So,... maybe I should go to Belgium, I know the beer is good there and they have an excellent bicycle path network so I feel at home. And I should find some Cystic Fibrosis patients in Belgium and see how they go!!!

NOW SHARE THE BELOW LINK TO HELP ME SPREAD THE PHAGE MESSAGE IN MY QUEST TO BEAT THE BUGS;

Phage or Fail: https://www.gofundme.com/phage-or-fail-with-antibiotics

Holiday Fund???

Come on people, this is not a fundraiser for me to finance treatment or have a holiday. Just thought I would be clear on this. I am mostly self-funded, always have been. I have done a lot of fundraising, and usually funds go directly to CF Associations etc and never into my bank accounts, but even so people were still regularly accusing me of asking them to fund my holidays. This is a big downer for me and makes me upset.

This time I want people to know about phage therapy and want to make a small documentary and publicise my experience because I feel this is something we need to know about. All of us, not just people with Cystic Fibrosis. It costs oodles of money to make a documentary (smallest budget is $1000/minute for a ! This is just a small start to see if there is interest!

I shared my CrowdFunding campaign on just one CF Facebook group and had some bad reactions. I am not going to post it on any other CF sites because I have spent hours and hours replying to negative misinformed damaging comments. Other people can share it if they like, but I will not subject myself to shitty comments like 'how dare you ask people with CF for money'. I am trying to help all of us, I am asking for a nominal sum of a $1 or anything to add your name to the list. A small investment in something that will one day add 10 years to your lives!

The world needs to know about Phage Therapy! My CF team in Australis has no idea about it. It is not widely known about, and is sometimes used (successfully!!!) as a last resort when it is almost too late for any cure! Read about Tom Patterson, PhD, a 69-year-old professor in the Department of Psychiatry who was saved from his deathbed. Just one example where Phage Therapy saved a life.

Another comment I fond on my post to the CF group was 'Pharmaceutical companies don't invest in it because it obviously doesn't work'.  How about Fluimicil, a mucolytic available in Europe and Asia for the past 40+ years is still not in Australia. Why not? Because it is not worth the investment for the pharmaceutical companies; 'It is available as a generic medication and is inexpensive'. Does it work for people? Absolutely, and finally, 40 years since it was given to me in Holland where I was born, people are starting to see the benefits of oral acetylcysteine. This took 40 years and still it is almost unobtainable in Australia. It is a money game. Why did we ditch electrics in the 1950s? Because oil made oodles of money. We are slowly trying to get back to electrics as the world changes its opinion on fossil fuels, even though it is way too late and we have almost 'missed the bus' on climate change.

Open your eyes people, open your eyes!! I am doing this to help people with Cystic Fibrosis and others with antibiotic-resistant infections, and I am scared to post this on CF forums!! Please spread my Crowdfunding campaign or this website and donate a dollar or more so you are on the list and kept up to date with the 'updates' that people that donate get in their email.

Walter---

Phage Club!

Yes, you should join the Phage Club! How? Why? Where? What?

If you have used antibiotics in the past and felt they did not work so well you are right!

Antibiotics are slowly becoming more ineffective. We need an alternative! If you have a chronic condition such as Diabetes or Cystic Fibrosis or have an immune problem, you WILL one-day catch superbugs and will need Phage Therapy because antibiotics are just not working for superbugs commonly found in hospitals worldwide.

By donating $5 to the Gofundme crowdfunder you will be helping promote the knowledge and effectiveness of Phage Therapy and you will be on the Phage Club list!

I have a Pseudomonas aeruginosa infection resistant to antibiotics. It is just one of many bacteria that people with Cystic Fibrosis get and have trouble controlling. I am going to show the world how Phage Therapy works and am going to visit Yale University where Dr Benjamin Chan there, an Associate Research Scientist of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, will try to kill this infection in my lungs using Phage Therapy.

The money I collect using the Phage or Fail crowdfunder will go towards making a documentary, getting publicity, press coverage, and help my travelling costs from Australia to the USA (people with Cystic Fibrosis are not rich :(  ).

Click some of the links above to read some background information! Links like
www.the-scientist.com/cover-story/viral-soldiers-34289 from where I got the image above..

Go Fund Me!

A GoFundMe campaign has started!

If you are interested in discovering or learning about Phage Therapy, know of people or have an antibiotic-resistant infection yourself, then you should donate $5 or whatever you can and get regular updates on Walter's journey to eradicate an antibiotic-resistant lung infection with Phage Therapy, the future treatment coming to a hospital near you ... one day :) !

Click HERE