natural treatment for the disease tetanus

anna rothschild: ever wanted someone else’spoo pumped through a tube in your nose? me neither. but doctors are performing this procedureon patients across the country. i’m anna rothschild, and this is gross science. inside every person’s digestive tract thereare trillions of bacteria and other microbes, and these little guys are really important.they do things like produce molecules your colon cells need to survive, or they extractnutrients from your food. scientists call these microbial communities your “gut microbiome.”and in a healthy person’s gut, there’s a balance among the organisms present thatkeeps the whole system in check. but, let’s say you wipe out a populationof bacteria, say because you had to take antibiotics

for some reason. other microbes can suddenlyproliferate out of control, in ways they never could before. this is exactly what happensin many patients who have clostridium difficile, or c. diff, infections. certain microbes disappear,allowing the bacterium c. diff to take over, causing diarrhea and even deadly inflammationof the colon. so, how do doctors reset the microbial balance?well, recently they’ve been turning to something called a “fecal transplant,” which whileextremely effective, is also about as gross as it sounds. essentially, doctors collect poop from a healthydonor, mix it up with saline, and then filter out any undigested bits to create a brownmilkshake looking substance.

they administer the poop slurry in one ofthree ways. the first is backwards, through the anus. the second is through the nose,using a tube that gets threaded down to the person’s stomach or small intestines. anda newer experimental way is giving the treatment in pill form. the idea here is that the poop slurry containsa complement of gut microbes from the healthy donor, which re-colonize the patient’s gutand out-compete the disease-causing bacteria. this process sounds totally revolting, butrecent studies have shown that patients with c. diff who were given fecal transplants hadan average cure rate between 91 and 93%. fecal transplants really challenge our ideasof what we think of as “clean” and “dirty.”

current research is showing that they’resimple life saving treatments, and yet, i wouldn’t blame anyone for being a littlesqueamish. by the way, don’t try this at home. ew. joe hanson: that was definitely gross. wannaknow more about c. diff and other superbugs? head on over and watch my video at it’sokay to be smart.