F2F Class Notes (Nemo) [R]

Vocabulary

ailment (n): 1-an illness:
E.g.: Treat minor ailments yourself.

replenish (v): 1-to fill something up again:
E.g.: Food stocks were replenished by/with imports from abroad.
E.g.: Does your glass need replenishing?

toxin (n): 1-a poisonous substance, especially one produced by bacteria, that causes disease

keep someone/something at bay-to prevent someone from moving closer, or reaching high levels:
E.g.: He held the police at bay for several hours.

recur (v): 1-to happen many times or to happen again:
E.g.: If the symptoms recur, visit your doctor.

diarrhea (n): 1-an illness in which a person’s solid waste is too watery and is excreted too frequently

fatal (adj): 1- A fatal illness, accident, etc. causes death:
E.g.: This illness is fatal in almost all cases.
E.g.: the fatal shooting of an unarmed 15-year-old

rampant (adj): 1-(of something bad) getting worse quickly and in an uncontrolled way:
rampant corruption
E.g.: He said that he had encountered rampant prejudice in his attempts to get a job.
E.g.: Disease is rampant in the overcrowded city.

Pronunciation

New evidence suggests there’s a much easier way to get a fecal transplant

Fecal transplants are an increasingly useful treatment for a range of ailments—but getting one is not a pleasant process. Now new research into the treatment of Clostridium difficile suggests there may be a much easier way to replenish the beneficial bacteria of the gut that’s just as effective: fecal pills, which are simply swallowed.

C. diff is a nasty, toxin-producing bacteria that usually lives in small numbers in the gut. In most healthy people, it’s not much of a threat—trillions of other microbes keep it at bay by out-competing it for for space and food. But for patients fighting off other infections, C. diff, can be life-threatening.

Powerful antibiotics administered to treat other infections wipe out all these other bacteria, allowing C. diff to reproduce with abandon. When it does, the toxins it produces can cause bouts of diarrhea and painful intestinal inflammation. Even when more antibiotic treatment can keep it at bay, C. diff infections (CDI) recur about 20% of the time—and can be fatal. Currently, about 500,000 people in the US become ill with CDI, costing the country almost $5 billion.

Four years ago, scientists published data from a clinical trial that found that fecal transplants were more effective at treating CDI than more rounds of even more potent antibiotics. These transplants take a slurry of stool from a healthy donor, and repopulate the gut with a whole new colony of bacteria, rather than trying to eliminate them with antibiotics. The new colony of bacteria once again prevents the C. diff from running rampant.