Hearing the word, virus one instantly comes to think of illness, disease and death. The extent of public fear can be estimated from the fact that even the slightest mention of word “virus” creates alarm and panic in the general populace. The awareness and fear of the viruses has generally risen among the general populace due to the recent coronavirus epidemic and the AIDS outbreak in 1990s.
However, not all viruses are same. Bacteriophages are a type of viruses that are naturally present in the environment and affect only Bacteria. Though, quite odd it may sound but these viruses pose no harm to humans. Bacteriophages after their discovery in early 20th century have been studied adequately. The food that comes to us either packaged or shelved in grocery stores, though effectively stored still contains small amounts of bacteria. Even these remaining minute quantities of bacteria have the potential to cause widespread disease and even death in the consumers.
According to an estimate of World Health Organisation (WHO) 600 million people fall ill after eating contaminated food and 420,000 individuals die each year. Despite the traditional approaches to improve food safety, food borne diseases occur frequently.
A new approach for combatting food borne disease is to use Bacteriophages targeting specific disease causing germs in food. There have been different approaches of employing bacteriophages in this process. These have been used to sanitize the equipment in the food industry and also increase the shelf life of food products against spoilage. In one approach Bacteriophages are mixed into the fodder and feed of animals prior to their slaughtering. These viruses reach the gut of farm animals and kill the bacteria residing in there, significantly reducing bacteria in the meat obtained afterwards from that farm animal. Then there’s another technique in which Bacteriophages are sprayed on the already harvested meat, fruits and vegetables during food processing. This prevents any airborne bacteria to grow on the food product, thus keeps it free from bacteria.
In addition to these, there’s another approach in which bacteriophages are ingrained in the packaging material. The presence of these bacteria specific viruses in the packaging kills any remaining bacterial cells in the food product as well as preventing any airborne bacteria from growing on it. To extend the expiry date of a food product, sometimes bacteriophages are directly added into the food product. Knowing about the presence of these bacteriophages in the food, might discomfort the consumer, however you need not to worry because Scientific Studies have proven that bacteriophages don’t cause any toxic effect on humans. In addition to this, bacteriophages do not affect the taste of product either, and are also resistant to food processing procedures. Nonetheless, it is a recently developed approached, with the first bacteriophage product ListShieldTM approved for use in 2006 in US for controlling bacteria in poultry and meat products. Seeing its potential benefit, other first world countries like Canada, Israel, Netherlands and Australian authorities have also approved the use of bacteriophages in food industry. This can also be seen from the website Bacteriophagenews.com containing a database of commercially available Bacteriophage products. Apart from its use in food industry, the bacteriophages are also being used as an alternative to Antibiotics. Due to the wide spread and unregulated use of antibiotics in the last decades, many bacteria have developed resistance against the original antibiotics. Which means that the new bacteria can no longer be killed by the old antibiotics. Bacteriophages are being considered as a potential alternative to the antibiotics. Thus, the day is not far away, when bacteriophages would have replaced half of existing antibiotic practices. This has also been termed as “The Dawn of Bacteriophages”. Nonetheless, very soon you might be eating the delicious products containing these beneficial viruses, even here in Pakistan.
The writer is a scientist and a published author. Currently, he is the assistant professor at the University of Management & Technology. He can be reached at [email protected]