Feces in, feces out

We have all heard about donating inner organs, blood or semen. Now for something I never heard about before, donating feces. New research shows that rectal injection of feces from a healthy person cures 75% of patients experiencing intestinal trouble caused by certain, often resistant, bacteria. These troubles often occur after antibiotics treatment has knocked out the naturally occuring intestinal bacteria, thus leaving room for harmful bacteria to grow. By injecting feces the naturally occuring intestinal bacteria are reintroduced to the system and can often drastically decrease the number of harmful bacteria.The treatment seems a little disturbing, but effective.

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Resistance: Fall of Man ?

Antibiotics resistance in bacteria is growing to be a large problem and will most likely grow even more in the future. Current research seem to agree, it is caused by over-use of antibiotics and incomplete treatments. Bacteria develop resistance randomly over time, however when exposed to antibiotics this gives a huge evolutionary advantage. If one organism develops immunity to a certain antibiotic agent when it is present, the competing organisms will die and leave the resistant bacteria with great opporunity to grow and procreate, thuse spreading its DNA. If the antibiotic compound is not present, this resistance is not a factor giving an evolutionary advantage. Thus, using antibiotics when they are not needed may increase chances of increased growth of resistant bacteria. One problem here is that many doctors prescribe antibiotics for viral infections; antibiotics is not effective against viruses.

To be on the safe side for the future there are several antibiotic compound that have been developed, but are not used on humans. So in the case of bacteria with broad resistance we have at least some alternatives. However, what is scary is that they are to some extent used in animals, giving opportunities for development of resistance.

Will a pandemic of antibiotic resistant bacteria be our downfall?

[Resistance] [Bacteria] [Virus] [Antibiotics] [Pharmaceutics] Share on Facebook