The word "virus" comes from Latin and originally meant a presumably poisonous juice. Later, viruses referred to the mucus that can slip through fine tissue and which microbiologists have been using since the early 20th century to try to collect the bacteria that can infect a human body. Thanks to improved microscopes, bacteriologists have been able to identify these cells as causes of disease - e.g. cholera and tuberculosis - since the middle of the 19th century, which has changed medical thinking as a whole. Whereas previously fluids in the body had been analyzed, the search was now on for the opposite, namely pathogenic particles.
Initially, viruses were not one of them. It was not until the 1930s that solid structures were identified, when electron microscopes were able to show how some of these viruses first attached themselves to bacteria and then penetrated them. They were referred to as bacterivores and were elegantly called bacteriophages, which was soon abbreviated to phages. Since bacteria had a reputation for causing disease, one has to wonder why medicine did not try to use phages as a cure for infections, although it must sound strange in the face of the coronavirus pandemic when viruses of all things are assigned a therapeutic role. As more and more soldiers died from bacterial infections during the Second World War, medical research had no time for viruses and instead provided antibiotics, with penicillin initially proving to be a miracle cure. Soon the range of antibiotics grew enormously, pushing phages into the background, from which they are now re-emerging. The unpleasant buzzword of modern times is antibiotic resistance. It is spreading among bacteria faster than the pharmaceutical industry can provide new biochemical agents, and so science is increasingly on the lookout for what is called "The Good Virus" in a book by science journalist Tom Ireland, which does not mean a God virus, but a good virus that can destroy deadly bacteria as a phage. After corona, viruses will probably not win any popularity contests. But medicine will have to rethink and conduct research with phages if we realize that, according to estimates, an incredible 10 million people will die every year from antibiotic-resistant infections by 2050.
