FINDING PHAGE: How I Partnered with a Friendly Virus to Cure My Deadly Bacterial Superinfection

Faced with a deadly threat from a bacterial superinfection which Western medicine and antibiotics could not treat, the author, Chris Shaffer, details his fantastic journey halfway around the world where he discovered an old technology that gave him the cure he was seeking. Phage Therapy, the use of friendly viruses to cure bacterial infections, is little understood in Western medicine but remains the standard of care where it originated in Tbilisi, Georgia.

Doctors in the USA have little choice but to prescribe failing antibiotics to patients who are dying from AMR (Antimicrobial-Resistant) superinfections. With hope for a cure in the USA fading fast, Chris sets out on a desperate mission to cure this deadly infection. Endless days and nights researching alternatives to failing antibiotics lead him to Phage Therapy.

Finding Phage tells a story of hope in a battle to survive an AMR (Antimicrobial-Resistant) superinfection, E. coli with ESBL. The journey begins as Chris is rushed to the ER in the early stages of SEPSIS which can lead to death in a matter of hours without prompt intervention. Treated with IV antibiotics in the ER and given a course of oral antibiotics for six weeks, Chris thought he would clear the infection and could get on with life.

Nothing could have been further from the truth. Once finished with antibiotics, symptoms soon returned. This would become the first of a more than two-year cycle of on-again off-again antibiotic therapy with each new day revealing more serious antibiotic side effects and diminishing health due to infection. Chris understood that treating this infection with antibiotics would be difficult if not impossible.

To save his life, he would need to go on a search of his own to find a cure for this infection as the doctors could only advise more antibiotics which were ineffective and caused a myriad of horrific side effects. The last hope when the oral antibiotics ultimately and completely fail would be intravenous antibiotic therapy with a three week stay in the hospital and an uncertain outcome. Chris was unwilling to accept more antibiotics which would likely not work anyway.

This book takes the reader through antibiotic use and misuse and why it has led to what is called the silent global epidemic. Bacteria have a unique way of outsmarting antibiotics leaving them useless. Most of our commonly used antibiotics are ineffective against newly emerging superinfections and no new antibiotics are in the pipeline to replace them. The Lancet medical journal recently reported that in the best-case scenario, the world will see 40 million deaths by 2050 due to the rise in AMR infections. No one expects the best-case scenario, and deaths are likely to be much higher. Common surgeries like tonsillectomy may likely become a thing of the past as the risks of superinfections become too great.

The FDA tightly regulates the use of Phage Therapy in the USA. Few people have been approved to use Phage Therapy despite its clinical record of saving many lives including Chris’s. Because of the global rise in AMR superinfections and the lack of new antibiotics, the world has turned to Phage Therapy for hope.

Working on a short timeline and diminishing health, Chris was unwilling to let the infection bring him near death so that he could petition the FDA for approval to use Phage Therapy. He traveled halfway around the world to Tbilisi, Georgia to start Phage Therapy. In four months, Phage Therapy eliminated his infection, and he remains infection free more than a year later. Phage Therapy did in four months what antibiotic therapy failed to do in over two years.

This book tells a deeply personal story about Finding Phage. It tells of personal work and medical stories that helped prepare Chris for this journey. It hopes to inform others how they might plan to Find Phage should the need arise.