In a nutshell, it works but antibiotics work better (until they don't, eh?), so phage therapy was largely eclipsed in the West. However:
> Isolated from Western advances in antibiotic production in the 1940s, Russian scientists continued to develop already successful phage therapy to treat the wounds of soldiers in field hospitals. During World War II, the Soviet Union used bacteriophages to treat many soldiers infected with various bacterial diseases e.g. dysentery and gangrene.[28] Russian researchers continued to develop and to refine their treatments and to publish their research and results. However, due to the scientific barriers of the Cold War, this knowledge was not translated and did not proliferate across the world.
> However, due to the scientific barriers of the Cold War, this knowledge was not translated and did not proliferate across the world.
I would hazard a guess that the reasons are other than translation. Keen scientists learn enough of foreign languages to read papers in their area of interest - reading scientific language in a speciality area is much easier than learning a language generally (I personally know scientists that have self-taught themselves for Russian, German, French, etcetera).
“Many researchers agree that the development of phage therapy has stalled because of ‘concerns over intellectual property protection’ and ‘lack of a predefined regulatory pathway’ (Kingwell, 2015)” https://academic.oup.com/phe/article/13/1/82/5741402?login=f...
> across the world.
Is that an American centric worldview? It makes little sense. Maybe the USA and allies, but there is a lot more to the world than that, and phages haven’t been used. The reasons for that are very unlikely to be due to what appears to be a simplistic world view.
I gather phage therapy was seen in Western bloc nations as akin to Lamarckian evolution, so even otherwise keen scientists tended to dismiss it. And of course, antibiotics work really well (until they don't.)
I have no idea how widespread phage therapy was in the Soviet bloc nations.
One of the more interesting studies I saw at IDWeek a year or two ago was phage/antibiotic combination therapy, which improves both. Basically, the bacteria being able to out evolve both of them at the same time is substantially reduced, and the introduction of phage can improve a bacteria's susceptibility to antibiotics.
> Isolated from Western advances in antibiotic production in the 1940s, Russian scientists continued to develop already successful phage therapy to treat the wounds of soldiers in field hospitals. During World War II, the Soviet Union used bacteriophages to treat many soldiers infected with various bacterial diseases e.g. dysentery and gangrene.[28] Russian researchers continued to develop and to refine their treatments and to publish their research and results. However, due to the scientific barriers of the Cold War, this knowledge was not translated and did not proliferate across the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phage_therapy
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_bacteriophage (for fun, or maybe horror? The oceans are grey goo.)