It’s “his last chance,” says Dieter Offermann. The 60-year-old flies to Tbilisi, Georgia to save his leg. For seven years he has been fighting bacteria that got into the wound after knee surgery. No antibiotic helps. Doctors recommend amputation. Will phage therapy in Georgia save his leg? It is the journey of his life, “his last chance”, as Dieter Offermann calls it. The 60-year-old flies to Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, to save his leg. For 10 years he has been fighting bacteria that got into the wound after knee surgery. No antibiotic helps. Not even the four other knee surgeries. Doctors urgently recommend amputation, but with no guarantee that the wound will actually heal afterwards. The situation with the bacteria is too impenetrable. A world is collapsing for Dieter Offermann. He is very active, works, has a large family, many friends, dogs – a fulfilling life. Dieter Offermann researched. A colleague tells him about phage therapy in Georgia. The phages – a miracle cure? Phage research has been around since the 1920s. Before the discovery of antibiotics, it looked like these viruses could be the panacea for bacterial inflammation. But they lost importance. They continued to be used only in the former Soviet states. Currently, phages are among the great hopes of modern medicine to counter the growing resistance to antibiotics. International health summits call for scientific research into phage therapies. European research projects are striving to have phages approved as medicines across Europe by 2030. Dieter Oppermann travels from Georgia to Berlin – to the Bundeswehr hospital, where doctors work on the subject of phages within a NATO research group.
Source : https://www.arte.tv/de/videos/104426-006-A/re-hoffnung-auf-heilung/
+ 995 32 2 37 07 02
info@phage.ge
Contact