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A comment on When antibiotics failed a severely ill patient, a virus saved him. Parent comment

Re:When antibiotics failed a severely ill patient, a virus s... by carbocation on Thursday December 08, 2016 @12:09PM (#13131895)
Viral evolution (for some strains) is much faster than that of bacterial evolution, if by "evolution" you mean mutation frequency.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC46468/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3342999/

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Re:When antibiotics failed a severely ill patient, a virus s... by tgb on Thursday December 08, 2016 @01:58PM (#13133019)
Interesting, thanks. Is there an explanation of why?
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Re:When antibiotics failed a severely ill patient, a virus s... by arrosenberg on Thursday December 08, 2016 @05:25PM (#13134865)
Broadly speaking, most viruses have no mechanism to control mutations other than becoming inactive/nonfunctional. Some bacteria are also like this, in that they can tolerate a high mutation rate without going extinct, while other bacteria have rudimentary control mechanisms that slow their mutation rate in favor of higher survivability and specialization.
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Re:When antibiotics failed a severely ill patient, a virus s... by danieltillett on Thursday December 08, 2016 @03:50PM (#13134165)
The rate of evolution is proportional to the population size. For every bacteria there are around 10 phages.
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