Guys, don’t worry about where you’re going to get your next poop transplant. If you’ve depleted all of the good bacteria in your intestines and are in need of a poop transplant (real thing) to save your life from a dangerous gastrointestinal infection, OpenBiome will do you a solid and make sure someone gives a crap.
Yes, a poop transplant is exactly what it sounds like. Doctors will actually take someone else’s poop and put it into your butt to replenish the good bacteria that your innards need to keep functioning properly. The lack of good bacteria, called Clostridium difficile (C. diff), is usually caused by a course of antibiotics killing the bacteria off, and it’s a problem that claims the lives of about 14,000 Americans each year.
Sure, there are other ways to treat C. diff, but according to a study published in The New England Journal of Medicine, the number 2 method is number one in terms of treatment effectiveness. Dr Josbert Keller, the senior author of the study, found that the fecal transplants didn’t just work, but they were more effective than the standard intestinal rinses and antibiotic treatments.
That’s why doctoral candidate Mark Smith and his colleagues started OpenBiome, because we can’t just be farting around with our donor stool. They’ve got a system in place to collect safe samples from pre-screened, healthy donors for the relatively new procedure, and they’ve already made 135 donations to 13 hospitals.
Don’t get too excited about donating, though, because OpenBiome doesn’t have to take any of your crap. According to their website, “If you’d like to make a ‘physical’ donation, we currently have a full team of donors hard at work, though we appreciate the offer!”
So, if you’d like to donate something, maybe make it a poop-themed slogan:
If you’d like to brighten our day with a joke, we have a good sense of humor about our line of work and appreciate all contributions! Give us your best shot (slogan jokes especially welcome) at [email protected].
Or you could give some money, which would be nice, but who doesn’t love a good poop joke? If you’ve got a good slogan for them, email it to them and then go ahead and leave it in the comments below. I think I’m going to go with, “We’re number one in number 2.”
(via Jezebel, image via Lillie Dot Com)
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