As many in the field of veterinary medicine know, Clostridium perfringens can mean bad news for animals. Certain strains of it cause diarrhea, and I'm not talking about your average mushy poop. C. perfringens diarrhea is its own special brand of disgusting. (Think pea soup. I'll wait while you picture that.)
Another species of Clostridium, C.difficile, has a nasty habit of infecting humans. Most often, infection occurs in a hospital setting after patients have been treated with a broad-spectrum antibiotic such as clindamycin. Once all the normal gut flora have been wiped out, C. diff comes in and takes hold, causing pretty severe symptoms. A bad outbreak can result in several deaths.
There is a treatment that has been gaining popularity recently. It's definitely one of the weirder ones out there, so brace yourself. Two words: Fecal. Transplant. Yes, that is a thing. They can actually take one person's poop and place it directly into some poor sap's small intestine. Not many studies have been done on the effectiveness of this type of treatment, but it does seem to work.
Well, researchers at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada decided to attempt to improve on this procedure, and perhaps degross-ify it just a little. They have actually created a synthetic, mechanical digestive tract. They call it the "Robogut." Seriously. They took a stool sample from a healthy woman and put it into their contraption, where they allowed it to percolate for a while. They then extracted DNA sequences of the bacteria that were present to make sure they knew exactly what they were dealing with. They selected 33 of the best ones, cultured them, and then put them all together into a bacteria "milkshake," which was inserted directly into their subjects' intestines during a colonoscopy.
And get this: in two patients, it actually worked. The good bacteria were able to take hold and kick out C. diff for good.
You can read the article from NPR about it here. Science is crazy and wonderful.
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