Fecal transplants are the hottest thing in emergent medicine, restoring balance to guts nuked by antibiotics and resistant infections, but there are risks. DIY is not the way to go…

Two patients contracted severe infections, and one of them died, from fecal transplants that contained drug-resistant bacteria, the Food and Drug Administration reported on Thursday.

Biohacker Josiah Zayner suffered from persistent digestive problems so he decided to undertake an extreme self-experiment: He isolated himself in a hotel room, took massive doses of antibiotics, and then gave himself a fecal transplant to transform his own microbiome. Mark Frauenfelder and I interviewed Josiah about biohacking, cheap genetic engineering kits, and, of course, his own full body microbiome transplant in this episode of For Future Reference, a new podcast from Institute for the Future:

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Fecal transplants cured 93% of diarrhea cases in a pioneering study, reports Ars Technica's Beth Mole.

By digging into the data on fecal transplants—which are highly effective at treating dogged gut infections, such as Clostridium difficile, in humans—Conrad realized that treatment didn't have to be that rough.

Marie Myung-Ok-Lee in the New York Times: "I delivered my first donation, in Tupperware, and Gene took it into the privacy of his bathroom. I stayed, just in case I was needed, and after about half an hour, he came out and told me, with a look of wonder, that he was feeling better already. — Read the rest

An effective cure for a brutal bacterial infection is gaining popularity, but there is a price to recognition: the FDA is clamping down on the procedure while researching it as an "investigational new drug." Now that doctors have to do a mountain of paperwork, will it result in a black market for backstreet blendastools?

Over the past few years, we've linked to a couple of stories about fecal transplants—a real medical procedure where doctors take a donor stool sample, dilute it, and inject it into the colon of a patient. It sounds gross. But it appears to be incredibly effective at treating certain intestinal issues. — Read the rest

The United States Food and Drug Administration issued a formal warning against Human Microbes, a California company that describes itself as "the world's largest, highest quality stool donor bank." They sell human poop by mail and apparently lack a license to "lawfully market" these biological products, the FDA explained. — Read the rest

Josiah Zayner is a scientist, biohacker, and artist, perhaps most well known for trying to gene-edit himself with CRISPR on stage and broadcasting his own live fecal transplant.

True to his roots as a rogue advocate for open science access, he's naturally turned his attention to COVID-19. — Read the rest

I can't believe I have to write this, but maybe jamming other people's shit up your ass isn't a great idea.

When done by medical professions, under very specific circumstances, a fecal transplant can mean the difference between life and death: implanting feces containing healthy gut microbiome into a patient's body has been used by doctors as a way to help fight antibiotic-resistant super bugs, like Clostridium difficile.  — Read the rest

Evidently you can be full of the wrong shit. A cyclist, by testing her friends fecal output, determined she needed better critters up in herself to improve her pedal pushing. So she did.

The madwoman behind "poop doping" is Lauren Petersen, a postdoctoral microbiologist at the Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine.

British science writer Ed Yong's new book I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life is a history of gut flora and bacteria, which first entered our consciousness as a scourge to be eliminated and has lately become something between a cure-all (see the universe of "probiotic" food supplements) and a superfood (think of the fecal transplants that have shown such promise in treating a variety of debilitating and dangerous health conditions).

A woman whose c.difficile infection was treated with a fecal transplant from her overweight daughter experienced rapid and dramatic weight gain as soon as her daughter's microbial nation took hold in her gut.

There's something nasty in the water, but Maggie Koerth-Baker has you covered.

University of Guelph researcher Emma Allen-Vercoe and her team have devised a method for creating artificial poop for use in fecal transplants, a promising therapy for people whose intestinal flora have been damaged by illness, antibiotics, or other therapies. The recipe involves a combination of indigestible cellulose and a starter culture of fecal bacteria. — Read the rest

At Scientific American, Beth Mole has a longer story about the FDA's recent decision to exert more control over the use of fecal transplants — procedures that attempt to cure disorders related to gut bacteria by, essentially, giving you somebody else's gut bacteria. — Read the rest

Despite regulatory headaches, a growing community of people with Crohn's, ulcerative colitis and other IBDs, as well as those with C. difficile, are turning to fecal transplants, often resorting to DIY poop-enemas.

The good news: Fecal transplants work well enough as a treatment for patients with Clostridium difficile infections that the Food and Drug Administration has decided to take them out of the grey area of legality in which they were previously being performed. — Read the rest

They aren't saying you should do it. There's really no reason to. (Even fecal transplants are done in a much less disgusting manner.) But if, for whatever reason, you were to ingest your own poop, you probably won't get sick and die from it. — Read the rest