Just when you think that you've heard every drug imaginable, some researchers have actually developed a frozen poop pill.
Now that sounds mighty gross, but get this: it can help save 90% of people suffering from a life-threatening bacterial infection called Clostridium difficile.
The body, especially the gut, is home to thousands of different bacteria. However, they all work harmoniously together to create an excellent balance and offer protection against harmful microorganisms. The body is even capable of dealing with Clostridium difficile, but taking antibiotics, it turns out, can actually disturb this harmony, causing this bacterium to reproduce in a massive scale and eventually damage the lining of the gut. Certain types of drugs can treat them, but patients often go to relapse.
A fecal transplant therefore is the most effective solution to bring back the balance. This involves harvesting fresh feces from healthy people and transplanting them on the patient.
So a team from Massachusetts General Hospital considered using a tube that goes through the nose, into the stomach, and into the gut-but imagining it alone is already spooky not to mention it can cause the patient to gag and run the risk of ingesting a portion of these feces.
So they looked into another option: the frozen poop pill. The initial idea was to make it more attractive by simulating how conventional pills look like, but the coating used by these common pills cannot sustain the strong stomach acid. The most ideal choice is to have these capsules covered in transparent coating.
If you can get past the idea that you're ingesting poop in a transparent capsule, you'll realize that it's been effective so far.
Twenty patients who suffer from recurrent infection of C. diff consumed 15 of these frozen poop capsules every day within 2 days. More than 65% of them were cured very quickly with no reported recurrence. Four of them had to repeat the cycle and then got treated as well. The last two didn't respond very well given their poor health condition.
As effective as they are, the researchers are still being vigilant as infections can also be transported in the same manner. Thus, they screened every donor meticulously.
