A century-old therapy used on sick turtles in Queensland is also helping develop possible alternatives to antibiotic treatment for humans.
The medical treatment known as phage therapy has proven successful in treating sick turtles where antibiotics failed.
Scientists at James Cook University found an amazing similarity between humans and turtles: in both, antibiotics can be as harmful as they are helpful when treating illnesses.
Sick or injured turtles were usually given a course of antibiotics, but researchers found the antibiotics killed off good bacteria in the turtles’ guts, making them unable to digest seagrass.
James Cook University senior virologist Dr Ellen Ariel said they had to find an alternative.
“What we found was that many of the turtles that we surveyed did have very high levels of multi-drug resistant bacteria, which meant that all these bacteria could not be treated with our traditional procedure,” Dr Ariel said.
The researchers turned to Dr Lisa Elliott for help.
Dr Elliott is a specialist in phage therapy, a relatively little-known alternative to antibiotics that uses highly specific viruses to target bad bacteria and destroy them.
“A bacteria phage is a bacterial virus, so it doesn’t affect animal cells or plant cells or anything else,” Dr Elliott said. “Its job is simply to infect bacterial cells.
“Instead of using something like an antibiotic or antimicrobial or a disinfectant or something like that, which is not selective at all and knocks out all the good and the bad bacteria, we can use phage just to knock out the bad guys and leave everything else intact.”
The results of the alternative therapy on the turtles were so positive it was hoped phage would help overcome the problem of antibiotic resistant bacteria in humans as well.
“With anti-microbial resistance being such a major global problem, Western countries are looking at trying to find alternatives to antibiotics or at least something that can reduce the usage of antibiotics,” Dr Elliot said.
“For the past 60 years, it’s actually been used extensively in human medicine in parts of Europe and particularly for things like MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus), which is a terrible hospital-acquired disease and pseudomonas in burns patients, and pseudomonas in cystic fibrosis patients.
“All of those sorts of bacterial problems that we have here in Australia and all over other parts of the Western countries can now be addressed with this therapy, so it’s actually really exciting to be involved in it.”
Dr Ariel said the unusual alliance had produced results far better than they had hoped.
“The research is continuing for other bacteria as well also associated with turtles,” she said.
“Phage therapy is really old — it’s actually existed before penicillin and antibiotics — so we hope that it’s something that will be used not only for turtles, but also for other creatures.”