When doctors told Christophe Novou that his leg would have to be amputated at the hip due to a raging bacterial infection, the 47-year-old Frenchman thought about killing himself.
After surviving a crippling traffic accident and dozens of operations to repair the damage, to him life in a wheelchair just did not seem worth living.
That's when an article about a clinic in Georgia offering an obscure treatment for hard-to-treat infections using live virus - something called phage therapy - caught his eye. Within hours, he was on a plane to Tblisi.
"Without it, I wouldn't be here," Novou told AFP on the sidelines of a conference in Paris about the mostly forgotten therapy, which remains marginal outside a few former Soviet bloc countries. The treatment harnesses viruses called phages to attack and kill dangerous bacteria, including "superbugs" which have become progressively resistant to antibiotics.
In Novou's case, it was Staphylococcus, a common bacteria which can cause anything from a simple boil to horrible flesh-eating infections.
Mostly ignored up to now by mainstream medicine, the alternative treatment has started to gain adherents over the last 15 years, especially in France, Belgium and the United States.
The renewed interest is partly driven by a problem which the World Health Organisation (WHO) recently described as a "global health crisis": the dramatic rise of antibiotic-resistant strains of deadly pathogens.
WHO chief Margaret Chan warned last November of a "post-antibiotic era" in which common infections will become killers once more.
Show us the money
"Phage therapy is especially effective for infections that affect bones and articulation, but can also be used for urinary, pulmonary and eye infections," said Alain Dublanchet, a doctor at the forefront of the movement to resurrect the treatment in France.
Discovered during World War I and developed during the 1920s and 1930s, it has few undesirable side-effects. Dublanchet, now retired, claims to have cured at least 15 patients of infections they contracted mainly after road accidents, and for whom antibiotics did not work.
Treatment usually lasts a few weeks, and is generally far less expensive than last-resort antibiotics which can cost tens of thousands of dollars or euros.
Pharmaceutical companies have shown little interest in phage therapy, in large part because viruses cannot be patented, according to participants at the Paris conference.
"The laboratories have turned their back on this because the return on investment is just too small," said Jean Carlet, an expert on infectious diseases and a consultant for the WHO.
A few start-ups have invested in phage therapy, which the European Union classified as a medicine in 2011. But the cycle of drug trials can easily take a decade, so these are long-term - and perrhaps long-shot - investments To date no virus used in phage therapy has been approved as a treatment.
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