In twenty fifteen. Stephanie strategy and her husband tom paterson. Both scientists were travelling in egypt. They sell the pyramids the nile and then as she tells it in this text talk after dinner one night. Tom became violently ill. He vomited all night long. And i thought oh gee he's just got food poisoning and i pulled out a couple of antibiotic pills that we take with us on our trips and i gave it to them with some water. Nothing happened the next day. Tom kept vomiting. Stephanie called doctor he thought yes food poisoning and set up an iv drip for more antibiotics. But tom only got worse at a local clinic. He was diagnosed with pancreatitis. Inflammation of the pancreas and medevac to a hospital in frankfurt and there. He was diagnosed with something even worse. A superbug a bacteria by the name of oscillator b-actor bowman scary name scarier bacteria it tops. The world health organization's list of most dangerous superbugs bacteria that are very hard to treat often resistant to many antibiotics. Now we'll never really know for sure where time got his superbug infection. But we do know that. It was an egyptian stream. And we know that. By the time he was medevac. Thome to san diego that it was resistant to every antibiotic. Tom was in a coma. His organs were shutting down. He was on three different drugs to keep his heart. Beating and the doctors told me that tom was going to die. But seventy refused to give up. She turned to the scientific community for help. I'm maddie safai today. on shortwave. What stephanie found and how it saved her husband's life. It's a century-old treatment. That could be a new tool in our war against super bucks for months stephanie's husband. Tom would remain hospitalized fighting for his life and losing. Yeah i was just really scared out of my mind. But i knew that if i just sat back and waited then he was going to die and i needed to know that i'd done. Every last thing that i could do that i would leave no stone unturned so i hit the internet and i did with anybody else would do in my shoes. Google it well. Luckily you know there's google for scientists and that's called pubmed and it's this wonderful search engine where you can put in any words and a scientific paper will pop up and you know i punched in words like multi drug resistance and the name of his superbug which is assassinated b-actor mania and popular within an hour. I found a paper that mentioned something called page therapy. So tell me a little bit about fish there. Well fay jr are short for bacteria phages and that's derived from the greek word meaning bacteria eater and they are viruses that have naturally evolved to attack bacteria there's ten million trillion trillion pages on the planet. It's all a matter of finding the ones that will kill the bacteria that you want to get rid of. Okay real quick phase one. oh one i like. Stephanie said bacteria phases the viruses that infect bacteria are everywhere pretty much anywhere you find. Bacteria you'll find a phase we're talking and artika deep-sea ocean vents your. But i swear that'll make sense later. Second facials don't actually eat bacteria in this case the fees injects its own dna into the bacterial cell. Then the virus forces the bacteria to make more and more copies of itself feeling up the cell with viruses eventually the bacteria bus open releasing all those new viruses. Go off and kill other cells. It's ruthless