Alternatives needed to do-it-yourself feces swaps

 

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“Already, instructions for home transplants are available online, with YouTube videos promoting the use of feces from friends and family. “Some have even approached us for advice about using their pets as donors,”  write microbiologist Mark Smith and bioengineer Eric Alm, both at MIT, and gastroenterologist Colleen Kelly of Brown University. Dog poop probably isn’t going to cure you of much, since dogs carry different bacteria than people do, and home procedures with pet or human stool can be dangerous, as I discussed previously. Not to mention that a home enema may not even get the microbes far enough into the digestive tract to be useful in many cases.

On the other hand, people are legitimately eager to treat their serious conditions with a method that has shown success rates of 90 percent and better in published trials treating C. difficile, a bacterium that causes severe diarrhea.”

Here’s the full piece.

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