Short on change?
Ladies and gentlemen start your bowels!
Dropping a deuce might lead to dropping a few dollars in your wallet.
Hey everyone, Julia here for DNews
People sell body parts all the time, eggs, sperm, plasma, but what about number two?
A nonprofit organization, Open Biome is tapping into this tight market.
OpenBiome collects stool samples and ships them all over the world to treat patients
infected with a nasty bug called Clostridium difficile infection or CDI, sometimes called
C. Diff.
It’s normally in only 3% of adults and in 66% of children and most people who do get
it, aren’t affected by it.
For those who are affected, this gut bacteria can cause a high fever, severe diarrhea, and
intense abdominal pain.
Severe infections can be life threatening.
Antibiotics help, but often they’re targeted as the cause of infection.
Antibiotics wipe the gut’s bacteria.
Both the good and bad kind.
Once it’s wiped clean, C. Diff takes over.
This leads to a vicious cycle of infection, round of antibiotics, more infection.
and so on and so forth.
This is the crappy thing about C. Difficile, it’s really hard to get rid of.
20-30 percent of those who get it, are gonna get it again.
Some, so badly, that they have to undergo an emergency colectomy.
Where doctors take part or all of your colon.
yeah ouch.
But there’s a new alternative, which we’ve talked about on DNews before - turd transplants.
If a patient’s gut is out of balance from undergoing a round of antibiotics, A transplant
can re-colonize the gut with a more diverse batch of bacteria.
To find a donor, doctors first turn to the family.
Families have more similar gut bacteria, for more reasons than just living together and
sharing the same food.
Genes seem to affect the microbiome, according to a study from Julia Goodrich, a researcher
at Cornell University.
She found identical twins had more similar microbiomes than non-identical twins, strongly
indicating a genetic link.
Microbiomes help us a lot.
In our guts they digest food, regulate our weight, and boost our immune system.
One study suggests that gut bacteria impacts how our brains develop.
But before you go out and buy the latest probiotic pill, consider this.
According to science writer Ed Yong, drastic measures like a fecal transplant should be
reserved for the very sick.
What we know, right now, is that there doesn’t seem to be a “healthy” microbiome.
It’s a dynamic ecosystem that can vary not just person to person, but throughout a person’s
lifetime.
A pregnant woman’s gut bacteria changes rapidly in the third trimester, it closely
resembles someone who is very sick, with high blood sugar.
Yet this works for her, she’s got a baby to build!
Our microbiomes are so personal and adaptable.
They change based on what we eat or even what antibiotics we take throughout our lives.
So it makes sense why OpenBiome is more selective.
They only take 4% of the doo doo that’s donated.
That’s a lower acceptance rate than MIT!
Some things you’d be rejected for: risky sexual behavior, certain kinds of STIs, travel
outside of the US within the last few months to a country where infectious diarrhea is
a risk, a BMI over 30, antibiotic use in the past three months, asthma or eczema, history
of irritable bowel syndrome or chronic fatigue disease, etc
But if you make it through the screening process you can earn up to $13,000 bucks a year!
So if you’re pinching pennies, maybe you should look into pinching a loaf instead.
And if the thought of having a surgical poop transplant doesn’t sound like fun, you could
also try taking poop pills.
Yeah, that’s a thing.
To learn more, just watch Tara’s episode on that right over here.