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Comment by joshuak | Hacker News Reader

Just out of curiosity does anyone know of research proving or disproving the viability of using 'safe' bacteria to defend against dangerous bacteria?

I've often wondered since we've selected for super bugs buy killing off the easy to kill ones with antibiotics, couldn't we intentionally reintroduce the easy to kill ones (or something similar but benign) so that the super bugs have no population advantage? Instead of being the only guys on the playing filed they'd have to compete with the benign bacteria which would, in my thinking, limit their growth potential.

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That's interesting. We also could revive phage therapy which uses bacteriophages (viruses that replicate in bacteria).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phage_therapy

Not quite the same thing, but do a google search for "fecal transplant"

Patients who have undergone antibiotic therapy will sometimes get infected with C. difficle bacteria. It's very hard to treat and can sometimes cause toxic megacolon.

If you take the feces of a healthy individual and transfer it to a C. difficle patient, the good bacteria will crowd out the bad bacteria and cure the patient.

The FDA just released some guidance on the procedure.

Yeah, I know about that, and I'm not talking about intestinal fauna, but rather infectious disease. Nevertheless, it is similar logic to what I'm suggesting.

We've been doing the probiotic thing for a long time, I can remember being fed not in the least tasty bacteria granules stored in foil wrappers in the fridge in the late '60s. But outside of the gut how could you do this? Skin isn't going to work, not with it being exposed to zillions of bacteria in the wild. Of course, those should be wild-type and not necessarily antibiotic resistant.

Reintroduce them where? Into my abdomen during my appendectomy?

Exactly so. Maybe, maybe not during surgery (depending on how benign we're talking), but perhaps at the first sign of non-responsive infection. Stop the IV antibiotics, and start up the 'good' bacteria drip.

This may of course be totally silly, but I'm just wondering if anyone has done any research on it.

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