The anti-detox: ‘Poo therapy’............

Interesting article..................

http://life.nationalpost.com/2014/01/08/the-anti-detox-poo-therapy-will-replace-cleanses-fashionable-detoxes-u-s-experts-say/






It is fashionable to kick off the new year with a detox, which supposedly clears the body of waste products that have accumulated over the year. But, in fact, the concept of “detoxing” is a modern myth, derided by doctors and dietitians alike in recent years.


However, scientists in the U.S. have come up with the “anti-detox” — a treatment that involves putting waste back in. Welcome to the strange world of poo-therapy.


A Boston biotechnology company has unveiled a “bacteria pill,” designed to unleash a flood of live fecal microbes into a person’s body. The pill, which entered clinical trials last month, is the first of a new class of drugs nicknamed “ecobiotics,” which aim to treat disease by manipulating the balance of so-called good and bad bacteria so that the beneficial microbes always have the upper hand.


While probiotic yogurts claim to promote good bacteria — claims not always backed up by research — they cannot pack the same bacterial punch as a tailored pill containing purified strains.


The poo pill is a particularly eye-catching development in the wave of excitement about the human microbiome, the term given to the collection of trillions of microbes — a cocktail of bacteria, viruses and fungi — that teem inside and on the surface of the human body. Researchers across the world are uncovering intriguing evidence that bacteria and other microbes may be implicated in serious conditions ranging from digestive problems, such as Crohn’s disease and inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), to obesity, diabetes, asthma and even mental health.


Just as the Human Genome Project was created to identify every gene and its associated function, the Human Microbiome Project (HMP), started six years ago in the U.S., was created to document the panoply of microbes that underlie some of life’s essential processes. Microbes play vital roles in digestion, metabolism, the production of vitamins, the regulation of immunity and response to drug treatment.


The HMP has been scrutinizing microbial colonies found in the skin, mouth, nose, colon and vagina (when samples are taken, the human DNA is identified and discarded, leaving behind the microbial genes).


The makeup of a healthy female microbiome is particularly interesting: newborns are bathed in maternal flora during birth, and breastfed infants receive further maternal microbes through breast milk. Both these aspects of early infant life — vaginal delivery and breastfeeding — have been associated with better lifetime health. In another study, Kenyan prostitutes were found to harbour cervical microbes that protected them from HIV infection, strengthening suspicions that the microbiome could be a promising reservoir of disease resistance.


But cataloguing the microbiome is proving at least as formidable as its human genome counterpart: there are 10 times as many microbes as cells in your body, and the total number of genes in all the bacteria and viruses that make up the microbiome probably numbers between three and four million (in contrast, the human genome comprises about 23,000 genes).


Humans harbour about 10,000 distinct microbe species. The microbiome typically accounts for around 2 per cent of an adult’s total body weight; yes, one-50th of you is bacteria.


The bacteria pill has been developed by Seres Health to tackle Clostridium difficile, a notorious germ and the enemy of hospitals everywhere.


Healthy people fend off C difficile without difficulty, but patients on antibiotics are vulnerable to infection because antibiotics target bacteria indiscriminately, and wipe out protective microbes and nasty ones with equal vigour. Infections not only result in unpleasant symptoms such as diarrhea, but can be fatal – more than 1,600 NHS patients died from C difficile complications in England and Wales in 2012.


If the infections don’t respond to potent antibiotics, patients can receive a fecal transplant, in which the diluted feces of a healthy donor (usually a relative) is fed via the rectum or nasal catheter into the colon to re-establish a healthy gut flora. The procedure, pioneered over the past two years, is successful, but there are downsides: it is invasive, not widely available in the U.K., and carries a small risk of introducing harmful microbes. And not many patients find it a palatable procedure.