I just heard a Medscape presentation on a newer approach to the treatment of someone with repeated bouts of C. Difficile diarrhea, often first brought about by multiple courses of certain antibiotics. There is a $500 cost to screening the stool of the donor, which is not covered by insurance. There is a very careful diagnostic and treatment plan for how, under anesthetic, this procedure takes place. The carefully prepared sample of the donor stool is diluted and placed, by way of the rectum, sigmoid etc. all the way up inside the recipient to "re-seed" the lower intestine of the recipient with different flora that now has a good "track record" (94%-97%) of solving the problem. This idea has apparently been used successfully off and on since ancient times and also in veterinary medicine.

http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/779307?src=wnl_edit_specol&uac=95507PZ

One must ordinarily be subscribed to Medscape to receive articles, but registration is free and one can disenroll right after.

I wonder what the reaction will be to the question I then posted:

<Has anyone given any thought to using the stool of an exclusively breastfed infant (who has never had antibiotics) either for the kind of transplant procedure you described, or, in fact, for placing small doses of the actual stool in gelcaps for oral ingestion if the patient is perhaps a relative, or the infant donor from a personally known reliable family who they can trust to know the baby has never had his/her microbiota/intestinal environment changed with even one artificial baby milk product? If the recipient consents with permission to do it this way, perhaps after appropriate scientific testing for evidentiary guidelines, it could thereafter be done without the expense of screening???>

A curious mind wanted to know.

K. Jean Cotterman RNC-E, IBCLC
WIC Volunteer LC       Dayton OH

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