THE BEST VIRAL NEWS YOU’LL EVER READ
STEFFANIE STRATHDEE hunched over her laptop, fretting. She barely noticed the kittens asleep next to her or the serene Buddha figure across the living room, anchored next to the glass doors that looked toward the gleaming Pacific. Her mind was 20 miles away in the intensive care unit of the University of California-San Diego’s medical center, where her husband, Tom Patterson, lay in a coma.
Patterson was 68; Strathdee was 49. They had been married 11 years, after meeting in a grant review group convened by the National Institutes of Health. He was a psychologist and she was an infectious-disease epidemiologist; when they fell in love, they also formed a powerhouse research team, studying the effect of the aids virus on vulnerable people in Tijuana, Mexico.
But it was a bacterium, not a virus, that was bedeviling them now. Three months earlier, on the last night of a Thanksgiving vacation in Egypt, Patterson had suddenly fallen ill, so severely that he had to be medevaced to Germany and then to UCSD. There were several things wrong—a gallstone, an abscess in his pancreas—but the core of the problem was an infection with a superbug, a bacterium named Acinetobacter baumannii that was resistant to every antibiotic his medical team tried to treat it with. Patterson had been a burly man, 6-foot-5 and more than 300 pounds, but now he was wasted, his cheekbones jutting through his skin. Intravenous lines snaked into his arms and neck, and tubes to carry away seepage pierced his abdomen. He was delirious and his blood pressure was falling, and the medical staff had sedated him and intubated him to make sure he got the oxygen he needed. He was dying.
Strathdee’s friends knew she was desperately searching for solutions, and one told her about an acquaintance with an intractable infection who had traveled to Eastern Europe to seek out a century-old cure. Strathdee spent days reading whatever she could find about it, and now she was composing a last-ditch email to the hospital’s head of infectious diseases, the person who would rule on whether they could use it to help her spouse.
“We are running out of options to save Tom,” she wrote. “What do you think about phage therapy?”
Strathdee didn’t realize it at the time, but her attempt to save her husband’s life would test the bounds of the American medical system—and throw its limitations into stark relief.
THE TREATMENT Strathdee had fixed on as a last-ditch hope is almost never used in the United States. The Food and Drug Administration has not licensed phage therapy, keeping it out of pharmacies and hospitals. Few physicians have used it even experimentally, and most civilians have never heard of it. But phages are a natural phenomenon, frequently deployed in the former Soviet Union. When used properly, they can save lives.
