Dysentery is no joke: the defining symptom, blood in your stool, comes from your intestinal lining sloughing off. A good friend of mine got it in India and said the waves of pain whenever she had to defecate were worse than giving birth without anesthetics.

The one upside is that dysentery is common enough in India that it was promptly recognized and treated, with a single giant horse pill targeting both bacillary & amoebic dysentery that basically cured her in 24 hours.

“Drink the Phage” will be the name of my retro death metal album

Title-typo: I got dysentery so you don’t have to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41911099

The idea that the phage could help before, during, and after is pretty interesting. Because although sometimes there are Prophylactic antibiotics, they aren't generally given to an entire population to my knowledge. And since diseases like this tend to be endemic to specific areas rather than a case here and there worldwide, so having something that's almost the equivalent of vaccine (although presumably short lived?) could really be effective for locals and travelers. Reducing the load ending back up in the water supply would then further reduce cases (ideally, although the extremely low load for this one may make it difficult).

Way more to learn here. The Soviets were really big on phage research also, wonder if they still have any interesting learnings: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7653335/

https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2023/05/03/...