In this issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases, Knoll and Mylonakis provide a balanced review on the phage therapy literature. Their review covers both replication-competent phages and biotechnologically produced lytic phage enzymes as antimicrobial agents. The authors, and the editors of CID, are to be lauded for this timely review as phages and their enzymes represent at least theoretically an interesting alternative to antibiotics. Phage cocktails have been for decades a registered medicine in Russia and are there sold as over-the-counter products in pharmacies. The product information recommends these phage cocktails for the prevention and treatment of a long list of bacterial infections. In contrast, phages have not reached the attention of medical practitioners in the Western world. Even the research community did not embrace phage approaches when major grant agencies from the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom called for research programs on alternatives to antibiotics. The phage therapy field seems to be split into phage-skeptics and phage-enthusiasts, where the former dismiss phage therapy as a “Stalinist cure” and the latter praise phages as a time-honored medicine. Skeptical scientists point to the lack of published scientific information on the efficacy of phage therapy. Indeed, Knoll and Mylonakis do not quote a single phage paper from Eastern Europe. This defect is not an overlook, but a reflection of a different publication policy in the former Soviet Union. Despite some recent efforts from the Eliava Institute in Tbilisi, the cradle of Soviet phage therapy, to collect data from the archives, Eastern phage therapy efforts are essentially not documented. From the viewpoint of evidence-based medicine, phage therapy is thus largely an unproven concept in human medicine backed so far by promising animal experiments. Detailed and convincing animal