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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.
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!
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."
Once you've been crapping your organs out for a couple months, I'm sure you'd be willing to try just about anything.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
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."
My stepfather had c. Diff last year. It isn't run of the mill diarrhea. Remember that scene in dumb and dumber with the laxative pill? Something like that. You are physically exhausted and your body is destroying itself. It spreads infection, your immune system goes haywire, your kidneys and liver work overtime breaking things down.
They quarantined my stepfather and told us that he probably wouldn't make it due to his age. He was put on antibiotics and morphine. I kept complaining to nurses that antibiotics actually caused this (he cut his fingertip and they gave him a dose 3x higher than necessary, if he needed it at all) and to look at alternatives but they don't really care. So many patients to treat, so little time. Nurses said the poop transplant was the option of last resort(even with 90% success rate) and that they would continue with antibiotics. My stepfather was pretty lucky to survive it and is now cautious about antibiotic use.
If standard diarrhea clears up in 8 weeks, is that in any way useful if you're dead in two?
... live.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Yep, the antibiotic regimen they put you on is no joke, either. It wipes out all your intestinal flora, leaving you super vulnerable to recolonization (and those spores are real fucking hard to eliminate).
My grandmother had a fecal transplant and she cleared up in days, after literal months of illness.
Source: I used to be closely involved with an MD whose primary focus was this bug. Well, the grandma part was sourced from my mom.
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
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.