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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.
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!
Fry: "I can't swallow that!" Farnsworth: "Well then, good news! It's a suppository."
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
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."
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.
"Eat shit and live, motherfucker!"
"Well, doctor, if you insist..."
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".
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
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
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.
C. diff infections are NOT always caused by antibiotic "overdose," which isn't really a thing - there's dose related toxicity for some classes of antibiotics, but not overdose. In the healthcare setting, infections are usually caused by overgrowth in the setting of depleted colonic flora, but symptomatic infections can also happen with contact with a patient already experiencing a C. diff infection - two years ago, a resident at my hospital ended up with such a severe infection she picked up from a patient that she nearly ended up with a total colectomy. In the community setting, about 50% of cases occurred without any prior antibiotic exposure in the past 30-90 days, at least according to a recent meta-analysis [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25058469].
...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
So it's no longer "eat shit and die"?
-Styopa
"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."
Whatever! Eat shit and, er, ... live?