If you want to get rid of a pest, why not use a littler pest to plague it? That's the tack OKd last week by the Food and Drug Administration, which has for the first time approved the use of bacteria-eating viruses as an additive to foods.
From now on, these viruses -- known as bacteriophage or phage -- can be sprayed on ready-to-eat cold cuts and luncheon meats by manufacturers to prevent listeriosis, the most deadly of all food-borne illnesses in this country.
The premise: Should listeria bacteria be lurking in your bologna or smoked turkey slice, the phage will attach to them, enter them and kill them.
To the average consumer, the notion that companies might spray live viruses on meat to protect people from disease seems counterintuitive, if not downright weird. But phage experts say there is nothing to fear.
"They are very safe," said Vincent Fischetti, a professor of microbiology at Rockefeller University in New York, and the head of the lab of bacterial pathogenesis. "These viruses do not affect humans. They only infect bacteria.
"It's just scary because everybody says stay away from viruses, and now we are eating them."
The FDA spent four years evaluating the safety and effectiveness of the "cocktail" of several phage at the request of Intralytix Inc., a Baltimore, Md., biotechnology company. In presenting its petition, Intralytix referred the government to more than 20 studies documenting the power of phage to fight infection, many of them performed in Russian and Eastern Bloc countries where phage therapies have long been popular in treating certain infections.
Intralytix also conducted studies of its own, trying out its phage mixture (consisting of six different phage that attack the food-poisoning bacterium Listeria monocytogenes) on more than 10 different kinds of deli meats, including sliced turkey, roast beef, bologna, chicken and even raw hot dogs, and found that they effectively killed all strains of listeria.
Phage are everywhere -- in the water, soil and our intestines and mucus membranes. Phage experts are fond of saying they're the most abundant life form on Earth. They are far tinier than bacteria: If you stacked every one of them end to end, you would have to travel at the speed of light for 200 light years to get to the top of the stack, said Fischetti, who is a consultant to a biopharmaceutical company exploring the use of phage in treating anthrax. About 10 million commonly reside in a single milliliter of unpolluted water, he said.
