Among the children who took the sugar pill, 6.7 out of every 1,000 got dysentery. Among the children who took the phage pill, that figure dropped to 1.8 per 1,000. In other words, taking phages caused a 3.8-fold decrease in a child’s chance of getting sick. Few people outside of Georgia heard about these striking results, thanks to the secrecy of the Soviet government. Only after the Soviet Union fell in 1989 did news start to trickle out. The reports have inspired a small but dedicated group of Western scientists to investigate phage therapy and to challenge the long-entrenched reluctance in
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