Patient Survives after Receiving Fecal Implant from Husband

Dr. Alexander Khoruts, a gastroenterologist, saved a patient by transplanting a piece of her husband's excrement into her colon:

Dr. Khoruts decided his patient needed a transplant. But he didn’t give her a piece of someone else’s intestines, or a stomach, or any other organ. Instead, he gave her some of her husband’s bacteria. Dr. Khoruts mixed a small sample of her husband’s stool with saline solution and delivered it into her colon. Writing in the Journal of Clinical Gastroenterology last month, Dr. Khoruts and his colleagues reported that her diarrhea vanished in a day. Her Clostridium difficile infection disappeared as well and has not returned since.

The microbes in the man's excrement replaced those absent in the patient:

Two weeks after the transplant, the scientists analyzed the microbes again. Her husband’s microbes had taken over. “That community was able to function and cure her disease in a matter of days,” said Janet Jansson, a microbial ecologist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a co-author of the paper. “I didn’t expect it to work. The project blew me away.”

Link via The Agitator | Photo (unrelated) from Flickr user pnoeric used under Creative Commons license

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this is amazing. Clostridium difficile is a very dangerous bacteria that is really resistant to antibiotics, I think mostly everybody has it living in their colon but our body's competing bacteria keep it under control. A lot of people in America get it from using wide spectrum antibiotics, for example amoxcillin, which kills a lot of the "good" bacteria in your colon, leaving Clostridium difficile to take over and wreak havoc. You'll know you have it if during or after taking antibiotics you start to get constant diarrhea that gets progressively worse.