Summary
Our antibiotics are failing us. In 2025, the UK Government said antibiotic resistance (AMR) contributes to more than 35,000 deaths each year in the UK. Emergency doctors say they are losing patients on a regular basis when they run out of ways to treat them.
Antibiotics have saved countless lives, but alongside them, there is another unlikely sounding ally in this fight: viruses, so small that they can attack and kill the bacteria causing these devastating infections. They are called bacteriophages, or phages for short. There are more of them than any other commonly occurring natural entity on the planet. And we could be about to see doctors using them on very ill patients in the UK. The thing is scientists have studied bacteriophages for nearly a century. They are used routinely in other countries, and science journalist Marnie Chesterton, who has been following this story for nearly a decade, asks why, suddenly, is phage all the rage?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:06.9 | Hi, I'm Zing Singh. |
| 0:08.3 | And I'm Simon Jack. |
| 0:09.3 | And together we host Good Bad Billionaire. |
| 0:11.4 | The podcast exploring how some of the world's richest people made their fortunes. |
| 0:15.2 | And we're back for a new season with a brand new lineup of billionaires. |
| 0:18.4 | Yeah, global pop icon Beyonce. |
| 0:20.6 | Hollywood movie director Stephen Spielberg. |
| 0:22.8 | Football superstar Christiana Rinaldo, anyone? |
| 0:25.2 | And as ever, we're asking you to decide whether they're good, bad or just another billionaire. |
| 0:30.0 | That's good, bad, billionaire. |
| 0:31.3 | Listen first on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:34.6 | What does Snow Leopard Pooh have to do with the biggest challenge facing modern medicine? |
| 0:41.8 | According to some scientists, we're about to meet potentially quite a lot. |
| 0:47.3 | The connection is our ability to harness the tiniest, most plentiful, almost living things on the planet. |
| 0:55.0 | Bacteriophages. |
| 0:57.2 | Before we go back to the zoo, I think we need a little more on these tiny phages. |
| 1:02.4 | What are they? |
| 1:03.4 | Well, they're viruses. |
| 1:05.2 | And if I were to look at some with an electron microscope, |
| 1:08.7 | I'd see a curious menagerie of structures. |
| 1:12.6 | Imagine the six legs of an insect with something a bit like a bolt screwed on the top of it, |
... |
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