Free Republic

Hold your nose and don't spit out your coffee: Doctors have found a way to put healthy people's poop into pills that can cure serious gut infections — a less yucky way to do "fecal transplants." Canadian researchers tried this on 27 patients and cured them all after strong antibiotics failed to help. It's a gross topic but a serious problem. Half a million Americans get Clostridium difficile, or C-diff, infections each year, and about 14,000 die. The germ causes nausea, cramping and diarrhea so bad it is often disabling. A very potent and pricey antibiotic can kill C-diff but...

SNIP Emerging science shows that a human’s microbiome – their constellation of gut microbes – has a far greater effect on health than anyone previously imagined. This enormous ecosystem we host in our bodies includes bacteria, fungi, viruses and more. The collective genetic material in the microbiome performs myriad functions that affect our mood, our immunity, and our physical and mental health. Crappy western diets and antibiotics are depleting our microbiota. And in some cases, a person’s microbiome is disordered enough that it needs a little boost from someone else’s. “We’re showing that you can actually reimagine a food system...

Imagine a low-cost treatment for a life-threatening infection that could cure up to 90 percent of patients with minimal side effects, often in a few days. It may sound like a miracle drug, but this cutting-edge treatment is profoundly simple—though somewhat icky: take the stool of healthy patients to cure those with hard-to-treat intestinal infections. A small but growing number of physicians have begun using these so-called fecal transplants to treat Clostridium difficile, commonly referred to as C-diff, a bacterial infection that causes nausea, cramping and diarrhea. The germ afflicts a half-million Americans annually and kills about 15,000 of them....