More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
September 20 - October 5, 2023
Second, the medical establishment and funding agencies needed to overcome their implicit bias against the use of unconventional treatments like phage therapy,
Third, Tom’s case suggested that it was possible to co-administer phages with antibiotics to enhance the effects of both.
Finally, the international effort to save the life of a single individual was global health diplomacy in action.
That complex collaboration could appear deceptively simple in Tom’s case because, in the end, all most people saw was that a very sick man was in the hospital for a very long time, recovered, and went home.
The FDA’s Cara Fiore had marveled at the astonishing synchronicity of it all.
Each in their own way had reached out to bring together the best from everyone and everything, everywhere.
Sir Isaac Newton famously said of his own accomplishments that if he could see further than others, it was because he had “stood on the shoulders of giants.”
If people like me who are supposed to know better are oblivious to the urgent threat superbugs pose to human civilization, how can we expect to inspire global action for change?
By 2050, one person could die from a superbug infection every three seconds each year, making AMR a more immediate threat to humankind than climate change.
A recent CDC report found that in US outpatient clinics, antibiotics were inappropriately prescribed almost half the time.
Roughly one-fifth of infections occuring in Europe, North America, and Australia are believed to be due to antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
Bacteria are evolving much faster than our ability to develop new antibiotics.
Our work ahead is to get clinical trials of phage therapy underway, all the while helping other compassionate use cases.
We now have evidence-based hope.
endured—and supposedly moved past. The illness was over, but my reactions to it were not. I would overreact to the smallest hiccup.
PTSD triggers similar deep wiring in response to a past trauma or terrifying event.
In the context of hospitalization in intensive care, the disorder is called post–intensive care syndrome, or PICS.
PICS refers to short-and long-term cognitive, mental, and/or physical health problems following a critical illness, with its hallmark being symptom...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Apart from the devastating number of deaths the US and other countries are facing due to the COVID-19 epidemic, thousands of ICU survivors will need both physical and psychological support to heal.
What we didn’t know is that families of ICU survivors can experience PICS, too.
It’s estimated that 10-15 percent of COVID-19 patients will acquire a secondary bacterial infection, many of which will be superbugs.
Pradeep Khosla, the UC San Diego chancellor, provided Chip and me with $1.2 million in seed funding over three years to launch the Center for Innovative Phage Applications and Therapeutics (IPATH), the first phage therapy center in North America.
New clinical trials of phage therapy are now underway for patients battling superbug infections associated with cystic
Total strangers helped us in our time of need, and we have broadened our efforts to give back, including our decision to write this book.
Tom has a new bucket list, and Luxor’s Valley of the Kings is still on it.
“A wise person once said, the two most important days in your life are the day you were born and the day you find out why.”
Perhaps one of the most relevant, as it affects us all, is something that the documentary filmmaker Janet Tobias recently said to us.
HIV researchers and activists believe that the impossible is possible—that it is possible to stop a global pandemic in its tracks, she said.
Choosing to die is easy, he tells me; choosing to live when you are in such incredible pain is much, much harder.
No, what our experience as HIV researchers and survivors of a superbug experience shows us is that when scientific advances, masterful medicine, and the will to live come together, that’s when the impossible becomes possible.
Without the scores of people who took incalculable risks and devoted time and resources to our struggle, this story would have been an ordinary death,
and one of an estimated 1.5 million people
Knowing that our experience has begun to help others makes the pain and suffering our family endured worthwhile.
