Also, because I had a sneaking suspicion - Strathdee was an HIV researcher. In fairness, most of infectious disease epidemiology is HIV research.
It's entirely reasonable she wouldn't have necessarily heard of a fairly niche therapy in another area - phage is basically a non-starter for global health (where her work was), and hospital epidemiology is a very niche field.
That is not a good excuse for not knowing something infectious-disease-related that the average user on a software engineering forum seems to know. It's like MDs talking about a programmer and saying something like 'It's entirely reasonable that, as a Python dev, he wouldn't have heard of compilers. He doesn't need them for his work, and compiler developmentn is a very niche field'. That's simply not a good excuse.
If phages are so extremely niche as you suggest, then how come that they seem to be common knowledge among software engineers?
And you're making an inconsistent comparison: it's not about being an expert, not even about having read a wikipedia article on the topic, it's merely about having heard of that thing existing. A Python dev who has never even heard of Rust or can't even guess what HPC might stand for would be strange indeed. And the same goes for medical professionals who haven't even heard about a whole class of treatment options for a serious global disease problem (and, as a corollary, cannot recommend consulting a specialist).
It's entirely reasonable she wouldn't have necessarily heard of a fairly niche therapy in another area - phage is basically a non-starter for global health (where her work was), and hospital epidemiology is a very niche field.