Shocking Superbug Solution Daily Dose – February 16, 2011

“Fecal transplant” could beat bacteria

Let me start off with the most disgusting question I’ve ever asked: Would you eat someone else’s poop?

Of course you wouldn’t... but what if it would save your life? Still a tough call, right?

I’m asking not to turn your stomach, but because you could soon be faced with that very question as desperate docs start looking WAY outside the box in the battle against drug-resistant bacteria.

One of the biggest threats comes from Clostridium difficile, a drug-resistant gut bacteria that often goes haywire in patients with weakened systems, or patients who’ve had their normal gut flora wiped out by repeated antibiotic treatments.

In mild cases, it can cause relentless diarrhea – exhausting, lasting, diarrhea.

Some people fight it for months, but that’s not even the worst part – because it also kills hundreds of Americans every day, often hospitalized seniors.

But now, docs have found they can wipe the infection away by simply adding healthy gut bacteria back into the mix... and the best way to do that is, well, remember that question I asked earlier?

Here’s how it works – and if you’re already feeling nauseous, skip ahead to the next paragraph: Docs take “donor” feces and remove the larger pieces (it’s not too late to skip ahead). Then, they run it through a blender with saline solution and stick it into the sick patient with an enema – or through a tube inserted into the nose or mouth.

They’re calling it a “fecal flora reconstitution,” but it’s known informally as a “transpoosion”.

No matter what you call it, it’s gross as all heck – but if there’s one thing that caught my attention beyond the bizzaro treatment itself, it’s the results: Researchers wrote in the Journal of Clinical Gastroenterology that they cured 18 out of 19 patients with a single treatment (as if you can imagine having to eat poop more than once).

In another study, 60 out of 67 patients – 90 percent – beat their C. diff infections after a gut “reconstitution”.

I hope it never comes down to that for you. But if it does, just try to tell yourself it’s a life-saving chocolate shake.

This might be hard to believe, but I’m not done with poop yet.

Page 2 – Shocking Superbug Solution From the farm to the kitchen

Pig poop is making you sick – and you don’t have to set foot on a farm or eat a single slice of pork to suffer a deadly infection.

Factory farms have already succeeded in breeding the ultimate in drug-resistant superbugs, thanks to the extensive overuse of antibiotics in livestock.

Now, they’re also perfecting the ultimate delivery system.

Scientists have found that flies – common enough on any farm – can pick up bacteria from animal waste... then fly off, possibly right into your kitchen around dinnertime.

A quick stop on your plate, and next thing you know you’re in a battle for your life, and you’ll probably never even know why.

OK, I know some of you are breathing a sigh of relief here.

“There isn’t a farm within 100 miles of me,” you’re probably thinking.

But you don’t have to live within a fly’s flight of a farm to get sick – because those superbug factories are also home to the world’s greatest hitchhikers: cockroaches.

In the same study in BMC Microbiology, scientists found that roaches – and you know how much they love playing in poo – can also pick up those same bacteria, then hop aboard a delivery truck, shipping crate or just hitch a ride out with a factory worker.

Together, these flies and roaches are practically weapons – flying, crawling, weapons loaded with drug-resistant poo bacteria and headed right for your home.

It just doesn’t get any more disgusting than that – except for that bit earlier about eating poop.

So what’s the solution? Obviously ban antibiotics for livestock since that’s the only way to halt the creation of superbugs on factory farms... but since this was a government-funded study, the researchers instead said farms should get rid of flies and roaches.

At the same time, the researchers admitted that would be “impossible”.

I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried. Buzzing off,

William Campbell Douglass II, M.D.