Posted on 09/04/2014 7:28:59 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Mark Smith was a microbiology graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology when, in 2011, a family friend became infected with the notorious superbug clostridium difficile. C. diff can cause severe diarrhea, disability, and malnutrition and is responsible for roughly 14,000 deaths in the United States each year. In 2012, after taking seven rounds of the antibiotic vancomycin and failing to improve, Smith’s friend received a DIY fecal transplant from his roommate—in their apartment, using an over-the-counter enema kit. The friend recovered within days, but “the whole thing was absurd, not at all how it should be done,” Smith said.
Fecal transplantation—transferring the feces of a healthy person into the bowel of someone with an infection—appears in published case reports as early as 1958. But in the past few years, scientists have established with more rigor that it can resolve recurrent C. diff infections around 90 percent of the time. In 2013, a randomized controlled trial published in the New England Journal of Medicine showed that the procedure worked better for this condition than antibiotics—so much better that researchers stopped the study early, saying it was unethical to continue to deny the transplants to the control group.
Within two to three days of the transplant, most patients are “symptom free …They get their lives back,” said Michael Edmond, an infectious disease specialist at Virginia Commonwealth University. It’s about as close to a miracle cure as medicine offers.
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
A good friend had it last year and landed in the hospital for 46 days. Had two fecal transplants from his wife. Second one finally worked.
Animals instinctively ingest poop for digestive problems. For example newborn foals ingest their dam’s manure to inoculate their gut with the right bacteria. I raised an orphan once and had all kinds with him until an old timer had me dose him with manure. Problems solved.
Go ahead and kill me. I take enough shit from my wife daily. ;)
I keed! I keed! I love you honey!
Can we transplant some of Dick Cheney’s fecal matter into Obama? Maybe a fecal transplant would give him a backbone or a set of gonads.
Never heard of this one! The stuff you learn on FR, remarkable!
Scientists are definitely working on it. I just finished reading “Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal” by Mary Roach. She covers a whole chapter on the subject of poop transplants in a funny but informative way. The whole book is funny but informative, considering the subject matter.
A few twists and turns to this.
Probiotic bacteria are almost exclusively aerobic, needing oxygen to live, which means they work almost entirely in the upper GI tract.
Fecal bacteria are almost exclusively anaerobic, meaning that oxygen will kill them. But this also means that they are difficult to get into the lower GI and colon.
However, early experiments with fecal transplant were done with what was called “chocolate shake”, which literally was a chocolate shake with a fresh fecal sample added to it, that would get “far enough south” to be out of the high oxygen parts of the GI tract.
Also importantly, the anaerobic bacteria, while good, or even very good, in the lower GI tract and colon, can be very toxic in about any other part of the body.
Add to this that a large part of the staff of the FDA, and the USDA, for that matter, are exceedingly bacteriophobic, meaning that they are scared of any bacteria, and find it hard to imagine that any bacteria could be “good”, much preferring sterility in all things.
As far as the intestinal flora itself, while it typically has between 300-1000 different kinds of bacteria in it, usually only 30-40 take up almost all of the available space.
Science is only beginning to get a grasp on how these bacteria, and the other microorganisms: viruses, fungi, amoebas, parasites, etc. interact with each other and our immune systems. But the bottom line is that they are just as much a part of us as our own cells.
I suspect the FDA will try to inhibit this as much as possible. Once the actual helpful intestinal flora are identified, they won’t bring in much $$$ to big pharma.
Things are entirely too complicated for an easy scheme. The amount of research currently ongoing in this is just staggering. Right now, the big bucks are in creating and patenting particular strains of bacteria, but this alone won’t do the trick, as a particular bacteria works in conjunction with a hundred other variables.
There's a more recent drug now - Dificid (Fidaxomicin), as was mentioned in this thread from early July - FDA grapples with oversight of fecal transplants.
My mom has been fighting C-diff for some time now. Her physician is sticking with Vancomycin but there doesn't seem to be any progress.
"Don't use any old feces from a friend or relative. Who knows what they're up to? Buy ACME's disease-free, special-diet-fed, guaranteed miracle crap!"
It's on my business card.
So, instead of finding and providing natural, already existing bacteria they are creating GMO versions to boost the price. Not good.
Not necessarily GMO. In fact, as complex as it is, GMO is pretty out of the question for the time being. Types of bacteria *naturally* have many strains, and some of them are better for some things. So what you have to do is find a strain that is particularly good at what you want, and patent it.
For example, Dannon found a type of bacteria that was particularly good for yogurt, in that it generated bulk in the intestines, almost like Metamucil. But at the time, they thought it was two different species of bacteria.
In any event, Dannon found a bunch of previously unidentified strains of this bacteria, which though they did exactly the same thing as the parent strain, were unique enough to be patented. And this gave Dannon *naming* rights of those strains. So they were able to give these strains good *marketing* names in different countries, even though they were basically the same bacteria.
For their part, other companies found different strains that they patented with their own marketing names. Same bacteria though.
Nothing really nefarious about it.
Wow.
Kinda gives a whole new meaning to the question “do you give a sh!t?”
The ladies do a similar thing involving tampons........
This is where I'm confused. How can they patent what occurs in nature, whether rare or not?
Right now, I’m not sure they can, but this is “new news”, as the law has been recently changed.
“Until recently, natural biological substances themselves could be patented (apart from any associated process or usage) in the United States if they were sufficiently “isolated” from their naturally occurring states.
“Prominent historical examples of such patents on isolated products of nature include adrenaline, insulin, vitamin B12, and gene patents.
“However, the US Supreme Court ruled in 2013 that mere isolation by itself is not sufficient for something to be deemed inventive subject matter.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_patents_in_the_United_States
But this being said, the question is how much GM is needed to establish a patent. I suspect that just inserting an otherwise benign substance, like a “glow in the dark” gene, a popular GM addition, that does not otherwise affect its function, might be enough.
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