This link is from Wired, and the author is a respected science writer also writing on this topic in Scientific American (I like her a whole bunch), and lets face it, C diff is REALLY difficult to treat so this is worth a read. Once you get past the yuck factor, it makes sense...
Fecal Transplants: They Work, the Regulations Don't
For months, physicians kept trying different drug regimens, while Thompson's hair fell out and her muscles wasted. By summer, she was down 40 pounds and close to desperate. Scouring the internet for alternatives, she found a description of a treatment that didn't use drugs. It was a fecal transplant, which is just what it sounds like: inserting strained, diluted feces harvested from someone with a healthy gut into the sick person's large intestine, in hopes of replacing the devastated colony of bacteria living there with a fresh, robust one.
"It made sense to me," Thompson says now. "And I had no other options. I was getting sicker, basically living in the bathroom, crying, emotional all the time."
She gathered everything she could print out, and found a doctor who was friendly to the procedure: Colleen Kelly, a gastroenterologist based in Providence. In late October 2008, Kelly performed the transplant as an outpatient procedure, after Thompson had done the clean-out preparations that someone does to get ready for a colonoscopy. Her boyfriend was her donor.
Swapping Germs: Should Fecal Transplants Become Routine for Debilitating Diarrhea?
Marion Browning of North Providence, R.I., was at her wit's end. The 79-year-old retired nurse had suffered from chronic diarrhea for almost a year. It began after doctors prescribed antibiotics to treat her diverticulitis, a painful infection of small pouches in the wall of the colon. The regimen also killed friendly bacteria that lived in Browning's intestines, allowing a toxin-producing organism known as Clostridium difficile to take over and begin eating away at the entire lining of her gut.
For months Browning was in and out of her doctor's office, getting big-gun antibiotics to suppress the C. difficile infection. Each time a course of treatment ended she would feel better for a while. But her strain of C. difficile was stubborn: a few of the destructive bacteria always survived. Within a few days they would begin multiplying, and the racking diarrhea would recur. After four rounds of antibiotics, her gastroenterologist told her that he had done all he could think of. He recommended that she see Colleen Kelly, a clinical faculty member at Brown University's medical school, who was trying something new.
Kelly proposed a treatment that sounded both logical and strangely unmedical. Normally, she told Browning, the friendly bacteria that reside in the human intestine maintain a seesawing balance that keeps pathogenic bacteria in check. That equilibrium can be temporarily disrupted--as with standard antibiotic treatment--but it nearly always returns to stability. Browning's own bacterial community had lost that ability, probably for good. Still, there was a way to restore normality, Kelly said. She could replace Browning's bacteria completely, by inserting into her colon a diluted sample of stool from someone whose intestinal health was good. If the good bacteria in the donated stool took hold and recolonized her intestine, the C. difficile would be crowded out, and she would be cured.
(Thank you Mike at Avian Flu Diary and Maryn McKenna. This is amazing!)
