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Stool Pill as a remedy for Clostridium difficile infection
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Could one’s stool be a remedy for another’s infection. Yes, stool therapy is the most commonly used one to treat Clostridium difficile infected patients. Clostridium difficile, the spore forming bacteria infects the gut and this infection is a disastrous one killing about 14K people every year. This gut related infection deteriorates the health of the infected individual and there is always several episodes of recurrence in spite of treating with the available antibiotics.

Clostridium difficile is mostly prevalent in hospitals and generally patients in hospitals are more susceptible to this infection whose normal gut flora is disturbed by their intake of antibiotics. Hence it is also called as a “hospital superbug”. This bacterium entering an individual resides in the gut in a dormant state unable to compete with the normal gut flora and becomes active in a condition where the gut flora is destructed by antibiotics. Once active, it is really hard to get rid of this microbe.

The transplantation of stool from a healthy donor to the infected person through colonoscopy and enema to establish gut microflora in the infected person to suppress the activity of the deadly microbe is one of the treatment method. As a next level of this treatment the infectious disease specialist Thomas Louie recently discovered an advanced method by developing “Stool Pills”.

His research involves extraction of microbes from the stool of a healthy donor (generally related to the patient) under laboratory conditions and encapsulating the microbes with trilayers of gel as a pill so that the microbes get released only in the colon when the pill is ingested by the patient. To take the pill patients are prepared several days before by giving them C difficile antibiotic and given enema on the day of the treatment so that the new microbes taken in the form of pills will have a healthy environment to establish in the gut. On an average about 24 to 34 pills are required by a patient to recover the lost microflora of the gut. Also the pills are to be made separately for each patient as their donors differ.

Freezing the stool sample for extraction of the microbes and isolating the particular bacteria effective against C difficile are some of the studies in pipeline.

Also in another study by the researchers at the university of Leicester headed by Dr.Martha Clokie reports the identification of the bacteriophage (Virus) that is effective against Clostridium difficile.

With antibiotic resistance shown by microbes being the greatest threat to the community, research studies involving discovery of bio medication is promising to overcome this threat.
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