Fecal transplant - yep, your read it right

[Guest guest]

Super gross and super interesting

How Microbes Defend and Define Us

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/13/science/13micro.html?_r=3 & src=me & ref=general <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/13/science/13micro.html?_r=3 & amp;src=me & amp;ref=general>

Extract:

'...

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 procedure ˜ known as bacteriotherapy or fecal transplantation ˜ had been carried out a few times over the past few decades. But Dr. Khoruts and his colleagues were able to do something previous doctors could not: they took a genetic survey of the bacteria in her intestines before and after the transplant.

Before the transplant, they found, her gut flora was in a desperate state. " The normal bacteria just didn't exist in her, " said Dr. Khoruts. " She was colonized by all sorts of misfits. "

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.

.... "