The use of bacteriophages, rather than antibiotics, is receiving increasing attention.

Researchers from Nottingham University in the United Kingdom have developed a new method for reducing the level of contamination of chickens by the foodborne bacterium Campylobacter jejuni. They are using bacterial viruses to target and kill the organism. They report their research today at the 104th General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology.

In the study, the researchers isolated a number of naturally occurring bacterial viruses (called bacteriophage) that can infect and kill campylobacter bacteria from the feces of chickens. They then used these bacteriophage to treat chickens that were infected with campylobacter.

This is hardly a new method, but it is a method that fell into disuse in the west after the advent of antibiotics, a change that has come to be regretted by many. See this history.

The first report about what we now recognize as bacteriophage was published more than a century ago. In 1896, Hankin reported that something in the waters of the Ganges and Jumna rivers in India had marked antibacterial action and could pass through a very fine porcelain filter. However, it was another 20 years before a British bacteriologist, Frederick Twort, actually isolated filterable entities capable of destroying bacterial cultures and producing small cleared areas on bacterial lawns (1915). Twort did not further explore his finding. Two years after Twort's discovery, Felix d’Herelle, a French Canadian microbiologist working at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, reported the same phenomenon. For d’Herelle, there was no question as to the nature of his discovery: "In a flash I had understood: what caused my clear spots was in fact an invisible microbe... a virus parasitic on bacteria." D'Herelle called the virus bacteriophage or bacteria-eater (from the Greek phago meaning to eat).

In the period after his discovery, D’Herelle promoted the use of phages as therapeutic agents for the treatment of infectious diseases. The first reported application of phages to treat infectious diseases of humans came from Bruynoghe and Maisin in France in 1921, who used bacteriophages to treat staphylococcal skin disease. Phages have been used, since that time, for prophylaxis and therapy in the United States (early 1930s) and, for the last five decades, in eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union.

The international literature contains several hundred reports on phage therapy, with the majority of the publications coming from researchers in the former Soviet Union and eastern European countries.