Arms like a baby and I thought no you know nobody has but staffs a disease scientist and C. Decided to take matters into our own hands so I held his hand with my blue gloved hand and I said Honey if you want to live Please squeeze my hand and I will leave no stone unturned and I waited and he squeezed my hand really hard and I pumped my fist into the air and I thought OK great this wonderful that I realized oh my God what am I going to do now stay tuned to hear how Steph went on to save her husband . McIntosh with the B.B.C. News Hello the Taliban have confirmed that about 5000 U.S. Troops will be withdrawn from Afghanistan as part of a provisionally agree deal between the 2 sides as the deal was being announced a car bomb went off killing at least 5 people in the Afghan capital Kabul from where lose to said it sent this report these are the 1st details to emerge from a highly significant and sensitive agreement between the United States and the Afghan Taliban it's a deal meant to end America's longest war and move Afghanistan towards peace but even as the U.S. Envoys. Was sharing details of the deal in Kabul the city was rocked by a powerful explosion a car bomb close to a residential compound housing foreigners which caused extensive damage and casualties and attack the Taliban say they carried out to target foreign forces the British Prime Minister Barak's Johnson has declare that under no circumstances would he ask Brussels to postpone further breaks it further as rebel M.P.'s prepared to try to force an extension government sources say that if the rebel delaying bill is passed Mr Johnson is likely to call an election on the 14th of October 3 days before a key summit the details from Jessica Parker. A cross party group of M.P.'s will attempt to take control of House of Commons business if they manage that it won't be until Wednesday that efforts get underway to pass the actual legislation designed to potentially mandate the prime minister to seek a delay to Bret's it over the coming days you could see a heady combination of M.P.'s trying to change the lore on Brecht sit and of 8 on whether to hold an early election one of the most powerful Atlantic storms on record hurrican Dorrian has virtually come to a halt over the Bahamas inflicting what the prime minister of the islands has called an historic tragedy here but Minister said 5 people were so far confirmed dead reports suggest whole communities of vanished under the impact of the storm in the Abaco Island Clint Watson is a local journalist it's moving so slow at a snail's pace dumping buckets of rain over that community and we're seeing videos of people opposing the social media in their homes there in the attic of their homes you see the water coming up through the windows of the attic from the ground it's unbelievable you Travis father that but that's what people are showing us by the video see please come and rescue me it's stories like about it you can't go out with your mind the embattled leader of Hong Kong Kerry Lamb has revealed should resign if she could following months of pro-democracy unrest in the territory in a secret recording Muslim is heard telling business people she blamed herself for igniting what she called unforgivable havoc she says a room for maneuver is limited to having to serve 2 masters the people of Hong Kong and the Chinese government in Beijing world news from the B.B.C. . A rescue operation is continuing off the coast of Southern California to try to find 30 passengers who were sleeping below deck on a boat which caught fire and sank the Coast Guard says 4 bodies have been recovered 5 crew members were rescued but dozens of people were trapped by the flames the details from Peter Bose the 22 metre chart a vessel named conception was being used by scuba divers the area known as the Channel Islands is a popular destination for water sports and fishing crews because of the fire isn't known but there are reports that there was an explosion on board the vessel was about 20 meters from the shoreline of Santa Cruz Island which raised hopes that some people may have been able to swim to safety the Coast Guard says hopes are fading of finding any more survivors the United Nations has criticized the Iraqi authorities for recently sending 1600 people in displacement camps back to their home regions the U.N. Fears they could be in danger the these people who took refuge in camps in Nineveh province after fleeing violence during and after the Islamic state group seizure of large swathes of Iraq. Nigeria's foreign minister Jeffrey on a murder said he sickened and depressed by the burning and looting of Nigerian shops in South Africa he said police protection had been ineffective hundreds of people in Johannesburg have been looting and torching shops many of which are owned by African immigrants the police fired tear gas rubber bullets and stun grenades and arrested more than 40 people the U.S. Anti Doping Agency USADA has withdrawn its case against sprinter Christian Coleman the fastest man in the world this year Coleman had been charged with missing 3 drugs tests and was facing an automatic one year ban you saw that said it made its decision after receiving guidance from the World Anti-Doping Agency Coleman is now free to compete at the World Athletics Championships B.B.C. News. Hello welcome to Outlook the home of extraordinary personal stories on the B.B.C. World Service I'm Johnny diamond later today we meet the Spanish sisters who risk their lives collecting red barnacles from coastal rocks but 1st squeeze my hand if you want to live that's what a wife said to her husband and then she helped save him Stephanie Strathspey and Tom Patterson are both scientists He's a professor of psychiatry she's an epidemiologist a disease detective an expert on how epidemics spread Steph and Tom are a kind of research power couple and as they studied the effects of AIDS on vulnerable populations their research took them to some pretty interesting places for work for play for fun they've been all over the world so eve going to track a girl was in Rwanda we saw jumping spiders the size of your hand and her wrists we've been to Africa on safari or a wanton hippo almost fell on our Can you and just narrowly escapes the terrorist attacks in Mumbai so we always thought that you know we had more shows up our bombs and that we were really missing all of these scary things there was a long running joke that wherever they traveled tall managed to pick up some local parasite or weird infection but he always bounced back that was until a trip to Egypt in the autumn of 2015 and Tom What was the holiday like what you remember of it we had a wonderful time I thought and we were on one of these river cruise boat tied up just across from the belly of the Kings had a wonderful meal out on the deck of the ship beautiful starlit night the Nile was a sharing we were the only people on the ship was designed. Her 150 and he was kind of odd sitting by yourself in a in a gigantic you know room but it was wonderful and then it oh it was you know went to bed after a great meal and stuff and brought a bottle of wine in a dinner and luggage and and so that was a celebration for us. And then I started throwing up got sick you know the 1st thought is Well I got food poisoning it'll go you know take care of itself it'll be fine and I just kept getting sicker and sicker and sicker so they hoisted me off of this boat and took me to this clinic which was rudimentary they did as best they could with me and took good care of me but managed to get me a C.T. Scan and discovered that I had a giant abscess in my gut almost the size of a football it's called assiduous S. Because it doesn't have a defined wall on it like a great big lump kind of like a big massive pimple in your stomach if you will Tom didn't get any better in fact he just got would us and it became clear that the clinic in luck still would not be able to help 5 days off to being admitted Tom was flown to a hospital in front that at this point I was starting to really fall and to call me was ALOSA Nate in thinking I was in Egypt seeing hieroglyphs on the walls and really losing it totally and the doctors came back. And said this is the worst infection on the planet this is an infection that's closed down hospitals in Germany it's called acid need a back turbo mania they tested it to see what antibiotics would take care of it try to kill it these are it's a bacteria that's infected to this exist and they found that it was resistant to over 15 and I biopics they said this is a super bug and they were not happy they were all Galland up and had me in isolation and really of their fear was that it would get out and infect other people and shut down their hospital I was really shocked because this is an organism that I used to played on my petri dishes back in the 1980 S. When I was an undergraduate student at the University of Toronto and it was considered to be a very wimpy pathogen back then we just needed globs and lab coat and no special equipment and over the last couple of decades it's become what is essentially a bacterial kleptomaniac it's learned how to steal antibiotic resistance genes from other bacteria and it's his beak has taken on these kind of super power capability is that have made it very deadly pathogen to one point I think in Frank you saw a little you appeared to be getting better I knew you were able to eat food and then it all went wrong again can you tell me what happened yeah they were able in Germany to stabilize me enough to where I hadn't eaten in days all Adonis turn up and I was starving so I demanded of my children who had flown over because I was so ill there was a concern that I wasn't going to make it. My daughters bring me a hair or and some cross-eyed. Well I got to eat and so I ate all about just gobbled it down like a pig and immediately just below it all out it was like stream that was projectile across the room course at that point I thought that I was was a loosening that I was a Buddha and that I was giving them a great gift and that these this vomit was actually beautiful streams of of tinfoil floating through the air and everybody was dancing around and in point of fact everybody was avoiding me and dodging what was really a gross situation Steph let me ask you you are a long long way from home and your husband at this point is clearly very very on wow even with your medical knowledge this must have been a terrifying time for the. It was one of the most terrifying things I've ever gone through you know Tom is a very big guy 6 foot 5 he was about 300 pounds and was always very fit and muscular and all of a sudden he just was disintegrating before my eyes and lost incredible amounts of weight and would go in and out of these hallucinations he thought that a terrorist was trying to kill him and that doctors are trying to blow who cause smoke into his mask and you know and I realized that I couldn't even leave him for a 2nd I'm not a medical doctor but I knew enough that we need to get him out of there and try to get him into the best possible care that we could it was time for another move from Frankfurt to the home hospital in California course by the time I got back to San Diego they again tested me for sensitivity to antibiotics and it was completely now resistant to all and ionic So it was a pretty much a downward course from them it was a few ups and downs but for the most part I was dying and Steph Whilst this is happening what's happening with you I mean are you simply being told by the stuff I'm sorry there's nothing we can do and thinking well that it's that simple well what are you doing when I realized that all antibiotics were futile I realized that we were in trouble and the doctors had a decision to make either to try to operate to take this abs the side of his abdomen or to put these essentially drains or catheters into his abdomen to try to siphon off all of this infected fluid and also That's what they decided to do because they said look you know if we operate in this organism gets into his bloodstream he's going to undergo septic shock and likely die so they. Put in these what ended up being 5 different dreams into his abdomen he looked like a pin cushion and he tried to set up in bed and one of the drains inside him slipped and it dumped all that infected fluid into his bloodstream an immediate Lee went into septic shock and and from that moment on this bacteria was now colonized everywhere in his body it was in his sputum it was in his blood and he was slipping away day by day the hollows in his cheeks or were just growing you could I could put my fist into you know this hollow am in his cheek bone and knuckles behind the orbits of his eyes and it was it was just horrible. Won't we being told by medical stuff. Well there was this one particular day that I was just trying to keep a tether back to my normal life and I was carrying on not just my research projects but Tom's as well because we work together and I was on a conference call and I was supposed to be there and I just called in for a short time and all of these people are medical professionals and they all asked how Tom was doing during a break and I told them what the doctors had told me then I saw the doctors coming and I got ready to hang up the phone and my friends colleagues of thought that I'd hung up and I hadn't and one of them turned to the other and said Has anybody told staff that her husband is going to die and I thought oh my God and I cradled the phone in my arms like a baby and I thought no you know nobody has. And that moment was so profound it kicked me into gear I realized my God if he's really dying then I need to do something if modern medicine doesn't have anything left I need to try my very best so I decided to accept Tom if he wanted to live even though he was in a coma I know from some of the medical literature that sometimes people can hear so I thought I can't just take matters into my own hands and try to keep him alive if he doesn't want to live anymore so I held his hand with my blue gloved hand and I said Honey if you want to live you need to give it all you've got and the doctors don't have anything left so if you want to live Please squeeze my hand and I will leave no stone unturned and I waited and he squeezed my hand really hard and I you know pumped my fist into the air and I said OK great this is wonderful and then I realized oh my God what am I going to do now I'm not a medical doctor I don't know what to do have my best colleagues in the world have been trying to save this guy but I decided to to see what I could turn up so Steph scoured online medical databases for alternative treatments to the superbug that was so close to killing Tom and she stumbled across something called bacteria phage therapy the name rang a bell she'd studied microbiology at university and she remembered what phage is were they were discovered a century ago and we used to treat cholera and some and then are infections but after the discovery of antibiotics in the decades after the 2nd world war they'd been dismissed and pretty much forgotten by Western scientists. Back in the 1920 S. And thirty's their B. Actually had something of a heyday because this is before penicillin was discovered and it was taken out very readily in the former Soviet Union because they didn't have access to penicillin when it came to market and there it's been used steadily but in the West when penicillin came on the scene it was treated as a wonder drug and certainly it was for quite some time and that was followed by other kinds of pharmaceutical any biopics that really made Westerners think well we'll just come up with a new antibiotic every time there's a new superbug we could stay ahead of this no problem Boy were we wrong tell me about how the phages were phage is are these small tiny viruses $100.00 times smaller than bacteria they're actually the oldest and most ubiquitous organism on the planet it's thought that there's 10000000 trillion trillion phages on the planet they're everywhere there and soil there and water there in our bodies there on our skin when you're trying to find faith on a faith chant you go to where you're going to find a lot of bacteria so one of the best places to find them is believe it or not in sewage. They attach on to a bacterial cell if they match to it they drill down into that bacterial cell and their genetic material enters the bacteria and turns it into a favored manufacturing plant as sensually all these baby phases are assembled and when given the kill signal they burst out of the bacterial cell killing it you have to make sure that you're giving phage that are going to kill the bacterial cell and they will keep multiplying and attacking new bacteria until all of the bacteria that they match to are gone and then they are excluded by the liver in the spleen without hurting any of the other bacteria in our microbiome Well this all sounds wonderful you found your miracle cure except for one minor detail they have to match it's not any phage for any superbug is it how did you find the phage will fade is that would match the unbelievable bug that had got hold of Tom when I realized that there was 10000000 trillion trillion phages on the planet I thought oh my God how am I going to do this so I went back to the Internet and I made a list of researchers who were studying phage that attack asked me to back to the many I stuck to North America because I knew we didn't have much time left and the very next day I got an email back from Dr raw young at Texas A and M. University and he said you know your story struck a chord with me I'm the same age as your husband I've been studying phage most of my life and I'm about to retire and I'd really love to see it help somebody someday and so if you can send me his bacterial isolette I'll turn my lab into a command center and ask researchers all over the world to send me their phase so we can test it against his bacteria and that's what happened and that's what they did and so you got this common sense and you got stuff flooding in and he's busy trying to match it up and how does all this take within 3 weeks. Had a phase preparation of 4 different phases and fade cocktail shaken not stirred and they had come you know up with just a wonderful response we essentially had faded researchers from all over the world that were offering help from Switzerland from Belgium from Poland from the Republic of Georgia from India the Belgians even offered their faith to be sent to the diplomatic pouch this was these were total strangers who had stepped up to the plate a true global village to rescue one man all well and good but there were more hoops to jump through Tom's doctors were enthusiastic about phage therapy but this was not standard practice far from it in fact no one in the U.S. Had ever been treated for a bacterial infection with phage is that meant they'd need approval for a one off experimental treatment from the Food and Drug Administration the F.D.A. Not only gave the OK They also put Steph and the team in touch with a new contact they thought might be helpful to the U.S. Navy which oddly enough housed the country's largest phage collection and they too came up with a fake cocktail within the span of a week so now we had 8 pages into cocktails ready to go and it was in the nick of time that we received these speeches Tom was in full life support his lungs are failing he was on a ventilator his kidneys were failing so literally he was within a couple of hours of dying so you get the approval from the Food and Drug Administration and you have the various phage cocktails ready and it's time to administer what is the scene at the hospital. Well there was an air of desperation but there was also a feeling of hope and I had been on Facebook keeping all of ou