poop pills
You Won’t Believe What’s In These Pills
Posted on by Dr. Francis Collins
Credit:: Hohmann lab
Clostridium difficile, or more commonly “C. diff,” is a nasty bacterium that claims the lives of 14,000 Americans every year. Most at risk are people with conditions requiring prolonged use of antibiotics, which have the unfortunate side effect of wiping out the natural, good bacteria in the colon—thus allowing bad bugs like C. diff to multiply unchecked. In many folks, C. diff infection can be treated by halting the original antibiotics and switching to other types of antibiotics. But for some people, that doesn’t work—C. diff is either resistant to treatment or makes a hasty comeback.
What’s to be done then? Well, researchers have known for some time that taking microbe-rich stool samples from healthy people and transplanting them into C. diff patients helps to improve their symptoms. The challenge has been figuring out a safe and effective way to do this that is acceptable to patients and doesn’t involve invasive procedures, such as colonoscopy or nasogastric tubes [1,2]. Could there be a simple solution? To put it more bluntly: what about poop pills?
