[aruanan]

E coli outcompetes the difficile. Too bad some Freepers here don’t understand the seriousness. This treatment is difficult to admin as obvious from the story. And testing for Hepatitis, etc. is essential. Looking up Healthy Trinity.

There is E. coli in human feces, but that amounts to only a few percent according to some researchers I know here at the University of Chicago who are working on inflammatory bowel diseases. The concept sounds gross, because who likes to ingest waste products--well, except for ethanol, which is yeast crap--but there are solid reasons for doing so. A gut unpopulated by good bacteria is just sitting there waiting to become the intestinal equivalent of a crack house (oh, ha ha, I just got that).

Sometimes even cow bile is given in capsules for medicinal reasons. Osage Orange, my doctorate is in human nutrition/nutritional biology with my thesis work and post-doc in neurobiology. Some gut bacteria are responsible for making short chain fatty acids that are required for gut health. Breach the gut immune defense and you're subject to all sorts of danger. Also, certain gut bacteria make vitamin K, required for blood clotting.

[muawiyah]

Aren't there several hundred different bacteria and yeasts in the human gut that seem to have some sort of part to play in our normal processes?

Supposedly they have a combined genetic diversity many times greater than our own.