If you are sick how far are willing to go get better. There is new controversial medicine on the market that consists of another person’s fecal matter. Fecal transplants can save people’s lives of those who suffer from a digestive order called clostridium difficile colitis or C. Diff. C. Diff occurs when the balance of bacteria, both good and bad, are disrupted in your stomach and intestines. As a result, clostridium difficile bacteria excessively grows to harmful levels and releases toxins that attack the lining of their intestines. Having this condition cause infectious diarrhea. In fact, 14,000 United States citizens die each year from this infectious are disease.
Fecal transplants itself however, is not a new discovery. Fecal transplants actually began on animals that had severe diarrhea. It wasn’t until 1958 when doctors started to perform the transplant in humans. Lawrence Brandt, a surgeon at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, stated that his performed fecal transplants were a success of curing his patients in a few days’ time.
Standard treatment today includes long term use of antibiotics, gastrointestinal surgery, and use of chemotherapy drugs. But with this new “Frozen Poop Pill” is an alternative treatment that could be less painful as surgery, less time consuming as antibiotics, and just as effective as any other option that is available today. The “Frozen Poop Pill” contains the good microorganisms of a healthy donor’s stool that when ingested will restore your digestive track back to normal. The microorganisms can only survive less than six hours once collected; thus, they are frozen to be preserved. Age was not a factor because the study found that the pill worked on individuals from eleven to eighty-nine years old.
A doctor named IIan Youngster performed a small study of 20 individuals. The study included giving the twenty individuals with C. Diff disease two frozen fecal pills for fifteen days for a total of thirty pills. Over the course of the experiment fourteen out of twenty patients recovered from the diseases and four more recovered after another implementation of pills. The last two people; however, did not recover, which is believed to be because of poorer health. The experiment was 90 percent successful reported in the “Journal of American Medical Association.” They performed the study for the second time of a group of twenty one individual and the results were conclusive to the first.
These two studies were the only two that I have found on the pills and they are both by the same group. But what I have found is that although the studies show a success, there is still a battle with the FDA to get the drug approved for usage. In order to become approved, the pills have to have come from a known individual of the patient or the doctor which means it will be hard to mass produce this pills.
In conclusion, I think this idea sounds interesting; however, I believe it will take a while before it will ever get approved. I say this because for one with the FDA’s process of getting approved standing in the way, it will be too much time and money to produce these pills for patients. Secondly, I believe it will take a while before it will ever get approved because as Dr. Hohmann states, “there’s always the possibility that unknown infectious agents could be transmitted this way” such as blood borne disease for instance, Hepatitis C. In addition, more research needs to be done with larger groups of people. Maybe even double blind placebo trails; conversely, it would be difficult because the pills are noticeable because they are transparent. The pills have to be transparent because need to be acid resistant in order to make it to your intestines which only comes in transparent and has to have its transparent. Thus, more research and is needed as well as solutions to mass producing before this idea of the future can become the reality of the present.
https://student.societyforscience.org/article/explainer-what-c-difficile