Slashdot Mirror
Feces-Filled Capsules Treat Bacterial Infection
sciencehabit writes Clostridium difficile infections kill approximately 14,000 Americans every year, often because the diarrhea-causing bacteria are highly resistant to standard antibiotics. Now, scientists have found an unusual way to combat the bugs: human feces in pill form. In the new study, researchers show that frozen fecal matter encapsulated in clear, 1.6 g synthetic pills was just as safe and effective as traditional fecal transplant techniques at treating C. difficile. Within 8 weeks or less, 18 out of 20 participants saw a complete resolution of diarrhea after consuming 30 or 60 of the feces-filled capsules. "It's probably not the best experience of your life," says team leader Ilan Youngster, a pediatric infectious disease doctor at Harvard University. "But it beats getting a tube stuck down your throat or a colonoscopy or having C. diff."
These are for patients who have recurrent C. diff, who have already failed PO vancomycin or fidaxomycin (difficid). Those are the only two antibiotics we really have after you fail metronidazole therapy. It's not an issue of strongness; it's penetrating into encysted bacteria which vancomycin does fairly poorly, and fidaxomycin does only moderately better. At that point, options are fecal therapy, another round of vanc or difficid with increasingly diminishing returns, or in severe cases, colectomy.
For some perspective, C. dificile kills 16,000 people per year in the United States. Compare that to how many people have died from Ebola.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The reason for this is probably because even the best probiotics hold maybe a dozen of the various things that populate the intestinal tract, while these pills, by virtue of being a direct sample, contain essentially ALL of the thousands of things that make up our intestinal flora.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
TFA says healthy volunteers. The big improvement of this method is that they can "donate" just once, have their donation frozen, and then have it .... used over the course of a few months. The previous method required a healthy donor the day of the transplant, usually a relative of the recipient.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.