Brighton professor discusses groundbreaking research on Radio 4's "In Our Time" with Melvyn Bragg

Professor Ebdon is one of three invited experts discussing bacteriophages – commonly called phages – on BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time which airs on Thursday 4 July and is hosted by Melvyn Bragg.

Phages are a type of virus, present wherever bacteria are found, which are capable of infecting and destroying certain types of bacteria while leaving ‘good’ bacteria untouched.

Professor Ebdon will share his expertise with In Our Time’s weekly audience of 2 million listeners, discussing the therapeutic potential of phages and their role in identifying faecal contamination. He will also draw on his current work in the world’s largest refugee camp in Bangladesh, where he is part of an international team aiming to reduce the risk of potentially deadly waterborne diseases.

Professor Ebdon said: “I’ve been working with phages for 24 years now and I think we’ve got an important role to show the public that phages are already being used as a force for good in many applications relevant to our lives.

“Phages themselves are tiny, we’re talking 24 to 200 billionths of a metre (nanometres), but we can actually visualise them because they will leave holes in a bacterial lawn in a petri dish as they destroy the bacteria. And sometimes they can do this in a matter of hours so they can give us results quicker than previous tests as well.

“I liken them to fussy diners in a Michelin-starred restaurant, they are incredibly choosy about which bacteria they infect.”

Professor James Ebdon

James (second left in white vest) working at the refugee camp in Bangladesh

Professor Ebdon and colleague Dr Diogo Da Silva, are currently working with Médecins Sans Frontières and BRAC at the Rohingya Camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, the world’s largest refugee camp, to optimize the treatment of human waste to reduce the risk of waterborne disease outbreaks such as cholera, dysentery and Typhoid.

The project, known as Project SMaRT (Safer Management and Reliable Treatment of Faecal Sludge in Emergencies), aims to enhance the chemical treatment of human waste during humanitarian crises.

“In a humanitarian emergency, with lots of displaced people, you suddenly need to do something with all the faecal waste that’s been generated and there isn’t time to establish conventional, biological sewage treatment, so there is a solution which involves using mineral lime as a rapid way of treating waste. We can use phages to show how well the treatment works.”

Professor Ebdon has used phages in several projects including in London during the 2012 Olympics and in Kolkata to trace Typhoid spread from one human to another using human-specific phages.

Professor Ebdon who recently presented on phages to a WHO Europe/Antimicrobial Resistance R&D Hub webinar, said that factors such as climate change could mean that phages take a more crucial role in world health:

“In last 20 years we’ve suddenly started seeing more frequent cholera outbreaks and when they’ve occurred, they’ve been much larger, so having methods that can be deployed rapidly is going to be increasingly important if we’re going to try and minimise the number of people impacted.”

In Our Time featuring Professor Ebdon will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 4 July at 9 am and rebroadcast late evening on 7 July and made available on streaming platforms.

Project SMaRT, supported by ELRHA, continues to push the boundaries of research and innovation to address complex humanitarian challenges, with a scheduled end in October 2024. For more information on Project SMaRT visit the ELRHA, Médecins Sans Frontières, and Bluephage websites.