Ep. 185: Treating Illness with Fecal Transplants

Guest: Jeremy Burton, Canadian Centre for Human Microbiome & Probiotics

What happens when your microbiome goes off the rails?

C Difficile infection is a common problem. What is C-Difficile, you ask? It happens as a reaction to the consumption of some antibiotics. C-Diff (for short) is a species of Gram-positive spore-forming bacteria accumulating in your gastrointestinal tract.

The symptoms can be diarrhoea, fever, nausea, and abdominal pain.

There are a number of treatments – some work and some don’t. That’s because the bacteria may have already developed a resistance to antibiotics. That can mean a dramatic intervention may be required and one dramatic treatment option is fecal microbiota transplantation.

You’ve heard about fecal transplantation, but that doesn’t mean it’s readily available. And it’s important to note it is filled with a wide range of challenges. Just as in organ transplant, there needs to be a match between the donor and the patient.

Canada has been an early adopter of this procedure and researchers are now asking if it can be applied in a number of other conditions, such as diabetes and obesity. Those researchers are trying to determine: if you can change the microbiome, can you then change the health outcome?

We invited Dr Jeremy Burton, the Deputy Director of the Canadian Centre for Human Microbiome and Probiotics, to join us for a Conversation That Matters about the exciting research underway in treating your well-being by re-engineering the bacteria in your intestinal tract.