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National Parks of
the Golden West
Canadian Rockies Tour
See up to 9 of America’s most spectacular national parks on this incredible
tour! Start off in dazzling Las Vegas and continue to the world-famous Grand
Canyon, Zion’s steep sandstone cliffs, red rock hoodoos in Bryce Canyon,
Monument Valley’s giant mesas, Arches National Park’s gravity-defying rock
arches, waterfalls and granite scenery in Yosemite, towering sequoia trees in
Kings Canyon, and everything in between-- America’s natural beauty awaits!
Fully-escorted tour with hotels, sightseeing, and luggage handling.Surround yourself in the stunning scenery of the Canadian Rockies. From
Seattle, travel to Glacier and Waterton Lakes National Parks. Cross the
Continental Divide enroute to Banf National Park and visit Lake Louise and
Ice elds Parkway, where you’ll enjoy an Ice Explorer excursion. Next are
Jasper and Yoho National Parks, the Okanagan Lake Region and Vancouver.
Fully-escorted tour with hotels, sightseeing, and luggage handling.14 d ays fr om $1,949* $1,499*
Departs June - September, 201814 d ays fr om $1,749* $1,599*
Departs July - September, 2018Save up to
$ 900
per coupleSave
$ 500
per couplework against drug- resistant staph bacteria
by applying the solution to the forearm
skin of healthy volunteers. With that box
checked, AmpliPhi has been strategizing
how to move to the next step, which re-
quires using the cocktail in patients who
are experiencing staph infections.
The fda’s emergency exemptions only
allow for treating one patient at a time.
But in research, one case is an anecdote. To
demonstrate to the fda that a phase-two
trial would be safe, the developers need
more data than a single case can give them.
Grint’s solution is to patiently assemble
an array of single cases, by contributing his
company’s phages to cases such as Patter-
son’s. “We’ve set a goal of, say, 10 by the end
of this year, and 10 to 15 in the early part
of next year,” he told me in 2017. “We will
then have a data set that allows us to better
design a phase-two study and answer some
of the questions that regulators have.”but while companies and the fda ne-
gotiate, patients need saving now. In
Octo ber last year, a 25-year-old womanin Pittsburgh named Mallory Smith, who
had cystic fibrosis and had received a lung
transplant, developed an infection in her
new lungs with a stubborn bacterium
named Burkholderia cepacia, to which CF
patients are more susceptible. The infec-
tion was resistant to every antibiotic her
physicians treated it with. Her father, who
had heard of Patterson’s ordeal, turned to
Strathdee for help.
On November 7, Strathdee posted a
plea on Twitter, asking scientists for any
phages that might have a hope of match-
ing: “#Phage researchers! I am working
with a team to get Burkholderia cepacia
phages to treat a 25 y old woman with CF
whose infection has failed all #antibiotics.
We need...phage URGENTLY to find
suitable phage matches.” Of the several
hundred phages from around the world
that Strathdee was offered, Smith’s father
recalls that at the last minute two looked
like a match. They were rushed to Smith’s
hospital and administered, but it was too
late. Mallory Smith died November 15.
Patterson, however, made it. He left
the hospital in mid-August 2016—gaunt
and weak, having lost most of his muscle
mass but having beaten the superbugusing phages. He was the first person in
the United States to have been success-
fully treated intravenously.
He is still frail; the last-resort antibiotics
he was given before the phage treatment
temporarily harmed his kidneys. On the
day I met him in their home in Carlsbad,
California, he had just taken a nap, and he
talked to me from a recliner, with a blanket
and a cat stretched across his lap.
“I’ve studied aids for many, many years,
since the beginning of the epidemic, and I
always thought viruses were the bad guys,
evil,” he said. “Now that I’ve gone through
what I have, I can see that viruses may ac-
tually be used for good, too.”
Strathdee, who is working on a book
with Patterson about their experience,
says she hopes to see phages become a rou-
tine option for serious infections, avail-
able to substitute for antibiotics or to be
administered alongside them, given early
in treatment and not as a desperate last
resort when nothing else may work well.
“It certainly seems to me a lot less risky
than antibiotics,” she said. “They’re
self-limiting: When the bacteria they attack
are gone, they’re gone. That’s a pretty good
designer drug, and nature gave it to us.”QTHE BEST VIRAL NEWS YOU’LL EVER READ
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