ONE MAN'S POOP IS ANOTHER MAN'S MEDICINE

I was giving my remote ‘what for’ today, and happened on a short scientific segment on CNN.

The title of the segment?

(drum roll)…

“One Man’s Poop is Another Man’s Medicine.”

 (The third of the seven words is, however, so generally displeasing that I shall hereafter use the terms, “stool,” ‘feces,’ ‘excrement,’ ‘manure,’ or some such similar word).

But allow me to begin at the beginning, and provide you access to a portion of the script of the program.

“Eric leaves his job and hops a train. Then a bus. Then he walks some more. He passes countless toilets, and he needs to use them, but he doesn't.

Eventually, Eric arrives at a nondescript men's room 30 minutes away from MIT. A partition separates two toilets. There's a square-tiled floor like in any public restroom. It's unremarkable in every way, with one exception: A pit stop here can save lives.

Eric hangs a plastic collection bucket down inside the toilet bowl and does his business. When he's finished, he puts a lid on the container, bags it up and walks his stool a few doors down the hall to OpenBiome, a small laboratory northwest of Boston that has developed a way to turn poop from extremely healthy people into medicine for really sick patients.

A lab technician weighs Eric's "sample." Over the past 2½ months, Eric has generated 10.6 pounds of poop over 29 visits, enough feces to produce 133 treatments for patients suffering from Clostridium difficile, an infection that kills 15,000 Americans a year and sickens half a million.”

Eric has previously undergone a complex series of tests in order to be eligible to provide his recurring donation of excrement, and he receives $40 for each sample. OpenBiome rejects 97 percent of all potential donors, as only a small percentage of the population are suitable for its purposes.

Allow me to rely on the video script once again.

“The 133 treatments Eric has provided won't be distributed until he's passed a secondary healthy screening. For now, they sit frozen in quarantine inside a giant freezer.

Most donors head on their way after handing over their sample, but during today's visit Eric asks if he can see the treatments he helped create.

Cool air blasts his face as Kim opens the freezer. His jaw drops at the sight of his icy brown bottles, which look like frozen chocolate milkshakes. The bacteria inside them is still alive, cryogenically preserved at -112°F.

That's fantastic! Holy cow!" Eric says, beaming. "It's unreal. I never thought I would be staring at my poop frozen in a freezer destined to help people across the country. It's really cool."

OpenBiome distributes what some might easily pass off as its ‘stinky medication’ to 350 hospitals in 47 states.

The cost of the cultured bacteria to patients suffering the afore mentioned disease amounts to $385 a pop, but 90 percent of the patients improve quickly, and experience normal bowel movements within days.

I suppose there is no suitable way in which to bring this little soliloguy to a close; especially given the rather controversial subject matter. It occurs to me to simply wish Eric, and the other donors of their rich, brown waste product a long and quite regular life.

(Script - Courtesy of CNN)

by William McDonald, PhD. Excerpt from (Mc)Donald's Daily Diary. Vol. 67. Copyright pending

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