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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."
It's probably not the best experience of your life
Talk about the poor chinese laborer who assembles the pills...
Mastering the English language is fucking easy: all you have to do is to put an f* word in every fucking sentence.
"Eat shit!" "Joke's on you. I already am."
I realize they were just trying to cure a case of C. difficile, but "Two girls, one pill" would have been much easier to watch.
Great. Now I'm imagining a bunch of guys pooping on a conveyor belt. Hershey Kisses anyone?
Typically the stuff has been spun down and freeze dried so it's not so bad....
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I bet you could stick them up your arse for all the good they'd do you.
Dont worry, candy coated shit pills may be a real thing now, but then again, so are fecal borne parasite pills.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...
Got asthma? Crones disease? Try our revolutionary parasite therapy!
Apparently, it's "eat shit or die" now. From your health care specialists no less! They must be bursting with anticipation.
Ezekiel 23:20
Or just fetch a package of Wrigley's Helminth.
Ezekiel 23:20
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.
No wonder they have such a small sample. After the informed consent form I'm sure lots of people told the researchers to gtfo.
Also, could an MD please provide the usual time frame in which diarrhea runs its course? 8 weeks being an improvement sounds just weird.
i *had* a low uid, but lost it in my lawn
Special combination deal: 10% off when you buy with breath mints.
-Turkey
Yes, that's been the preferred method so far. People gong on massive antibiotics have stockpiled frozen fecal suppositories with perfectly good results. Not FDA approves since it's not been properly tested until recently.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
... Your options are not only "getting a tube stuck down your throat or a colonoscopy or having C. diff." or taking these pills. There are indeed stronger antibiotics which work.
researchers show that frozen fecal matter encapsulated in clear, 1.6 g synthetic pills
I don't see anything about "clear" in the linked article's linked article. I'd think opaque ones would be a lot more popular.
Might be worth pointing out that they don't just squirt poop into a capsule. It does at least go through a bit of processing and filtration first.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
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.
Google it. Anyhow, this isn't necessarily a new thing - but that's the only person I've heard of who has done such a thing. Not exactly a great product endorser.
Ahh, The eponymous doubleshit gum.
The gum EVERYONE gives two shits over.
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."
... live.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Gives a new meaning to "Eat shit and live".
has a chapter on this, done up in her usual hilarious style.
The capsules are clear because they have to survive the stomach to get the icky contents into the intestine. For whatever reason they only make those capsules clear.
... also known as Taco Bell burritos.
This article is full of Sh!t
That's nothing, the pills taste like crap...
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
Nah... They will just re-market it as a health video.
Is this the patient's own faeces, or someone else's?
Typically the stuff has been spun down and freeze dried so it's not so bad....
...says the guy who's clearly got experience making some seriously shitty homemade jerky.
Within 8 weeks ... saw a complete resolution of diarrhea after consuming 30 or 60 of the feces-filled capsules.
Um... that's an improvement? That's like advertizing "We found a new cure for hemorrhoids! It takes 2 months and involves a soldering iron!"
It's an improvement over suffering from diarrhea until you die, months later. And *a* cure for hemorrhoids actually does involve something like a soldering iron (laser). It's just a bit faster than 2 months, although recovery will be quite a few days. And incredibly painful if you're part of the unlucky 2% or so of the population who have nerve endings in the wrong place.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
In all seriousness - I imagine the pills are fine, but any subsequent burps are rather unpleasant.
#DeleteChrome
...was too difficult?
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
that'll teach those heathen "pill first" types to properly sip of the water and THEN put the pill in their mouths.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
*sigh* Why does everything on /. have to degenerate into a bickering about politicians?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Seriously, who is the donor?
Do you get to decide what they eat before they donate?
What if you actually met the donor? That would be weird. "Oh, by the way, I ate your shit."
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.
Chocolate coat it?
...but I decided it was just a bunch of crap.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Killing healthcare workers prevents Ebola and I'll just betcha that injecting hemorrhaged blood from an Ebola victim in his family will vaccinate against Ebola.
In fact, let's get rid of public sanitation. What a regressive idea.
Seastead this.
..
Now we need better gelatin capsules that don't get caught and dissolve in the back of your throat.
Because.. I just don't want to think about that.
*shudder*
THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK.
do you have a shit eating grin?
So it's no longer "eat shit and die"?
-Styopa
Hershey "chocolate" is made from vomit rather than feces. And this is not a joke; at the time I assumed I got a badly spoiled piece.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Obviously you haven't tried chewing them.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
"You take the blue pill - you wake up in your bed, a victim of projectile diarrhea. You take the red pill - I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes...but you still suffer from projectile diarrhea."
For the love of god, why oh why do the pills have to be clear?!?
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.
Whatever! Eat shit and, er, ... live?
Call me a conspiracy nut, or whatever you want; but I question what's going on here. Is there someone with a background that can explain?
A fecal transplant can be done with an enema, and my understanding is that it's quite effective. But some doctors aren't interested, preferring either to deliver the dose via a colonoscopy or endoscopy. My father had C. Diff last year, but began to get nauseated when they tried putting tubes up his nose. So the doctor was going to recommend as an alternative—and I swear this is true—that my father mix feces up in a blender with yogurt and eat it. WTF!
If you ask me, an enema can be done by a nurse, or even at home, for next to nothing. There's no money in that for the doctor, like there is with a colonoscopy, for instance. Now there's a little pill: meaning, that drug companies can get rich, rather than pharmacies selling enema kits for $15 a pop. Isn't that what's going on?
Am I wrong here? I'd love to have someone tell me—with documentation—that enemas are ineffective and that pills and medical procedures are actually the best way, but I'm skeptical. I think there's more economics behind these courses of treatment than there is medicine.
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
They could color it.
Then you could eat shit and dye.
So we'll have a bunch of idiots reading this type of article or seeing it somewhere in the news, and immediately start feeding their sick family members their own shit to save money. This spells disaster all over it. Rather than "Please Wash Your Hands" signs, people will expect "Please Poop On Your Hands" signs in their place -- for health reasons, of course.
I'd imagine that the technicians designing the pill choose appropriate packaging materials that (1) wouldn't rupture under chewing (because NOBODY reads the instructions on the package, EVER. Well known fact.) and (2) don't release their contents until after acid immersion followed by a return to more normal pH (indicating that the pill has passed the stomach and is now in the small intestine, where the bugs are desired.
You know, people do think these things through. Unlike people looking for a quick laugh on Slashdot.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"