Blogging from Atlanta at ICEID, the perfect venue to highlight today's story in the NY Times by Carl Zimmer discussing gut microbes in health and disease--including an introduction focusing on fecal transplants to treat Clostridium difficile infections. If you're at ICEID, be sure to swing by several posters in both sessions today showing new work (ours and others') on zoonotic MRSA.
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Image of C. difficile from BBC News.
You may recall a prior post about a dog that could smell when patients were infected with Clostridium difficile. C. difficile causes about 14,000 deaths per year in the United States. Recent breakthroughs in understanding gut microbes have led to the…
Over the past few years, the incidence of Clostridium difficile infections has risen in the US, and 14,000 people have died from the persistent diarrhea this bacteria causes. Some patients who haven’t been cured by antibiotics have turned to “fecal transplants” – the introduction of a healthy…
On an academic level, I am not a fan of bacteria. I like viruses. Thus, I usually like the idea of using viruses to kill bacteria. But I am a huge fan of fecal bacteriotherapy, aka, poop transplants.
Someone is sick, they get antibiotics. Antibiotics kill off their 'normal' bacteria, and allow 'bad…
Species of the bacterium Clostridium have long been a scourge of humans. They are gram-positive, spore-forming bacteria that can be found in the soil around all of us. The spores then germinate when exposed to anaerobic conditions.
Clostridium botulinum is the cause of botulism, a serious and…
Do you have an opinion on whether there's any scientific basis for treating Crohn's disease with gut bacteria?
There have been a few papers showing success, but the numbers are really tiny so far on published trials.
Do you have an opinion on whether there's any scientific basis for treating Crohn's disease with gut bacteria?