Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/06/25/fda-warns-company-selling-human-poop-by-mail.html
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I can’t comment on this individual company, but my wife has greatly benefitted from FMT when all other treatments failed her. It is primarily used to treat recurrent C. Diff infections that have been resistant to other treatments.
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Welp, if they shut this company down you’re just gonna have to go back to buying your human poop from shady characters on the street like we did in the old days.
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I’m glad someone made this point. It is a treatment that can work when all others fail.
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ok probably regret asking, but how is the transplantee to implant the transplant? they’re not assuming the microbes are all sufficiently ‘ensporulated’ to survive the stomach acid pathway, are they? (‘eat … and die!’) and superficially rectally isn’t provide enough ‘mixing’, is it? (probably a large intestinal target as opposed to small, butt…)
at the rate of $500 per poop.
that’s some expensive shıt
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Shouldn’t the USPS be warning them as well? I thought human poop was on their list of forbidden items.
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So we’ll have to go back to ordering it from Amazon?
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Don’t tell Lord Dampnut about this.
Nest thing you know, there will be Trump Turds for sale on his website at $5k each.
ETA: Trump Turds sounds a bit redundant…
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This sounds like a load of crap
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Well… let me tell you because I bought a frozen poop from this very company in October. For $1200. If you pay an additional few hundred the donor will encapsulate it for you (put it in pills) but $1200 was already a stretch for me so I just got a frozen poop in the mail (to the other commenter it wasn’t USPS). I then melted it in its baggie in a tub of water and used a feeding syringe to inject it into large gel caps and refroze them. But to your point about about stomach acid, at least for me, I didn’t see any improvements from the pills. Not until I did the “long retention enemas” which was maybe the grossest thing I’ve ever done.
You can’t get FMT clinically in the US unless you have recurrent C-Diff so unless I wanted to fly to England this was my only option for treating my IBS (yes I tryed gad damn everything else). It didn’t cure everything but it helped A LOT and made my life substantially more livable. Would recommend.
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A stool donor bank? Who doesn’t think their bank is shit? Could this be only part of a much larger problem? 
That seems like about what I’d expect. Our regulatory pathways are not actually designed to ensure that promising new treatments get investigated, approved, and on the market in time to help the people who would benefit from them.
This is true for, specifically, recurrent C. diff infections, which are a bear to treat otherwise. I fear the increasing (legit) research into the various effects of the microbiome on pretty much all aspects of our functioning. Sadly, I have been fully expecting the woo-meisters to enter this field, especially since “do it yourself” seems so easy, “it’s just an enema” right? No, no it is not. You first have to pretty much knock out the existing biota with high caliber antibiotics to start with essentially a clean slate, then proceed with the new occupants. Not to mention the danger of largely unregulated human byproducts being marketed with who knows what testing and clearance. I think I hate this development. As usual, if something is billed to cure everything, it very likely cures nothing.
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Or maybe it takes more than just a vague e-mail which may or may not made it through the spam filter to start a regulatory process.
Who knows?
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I am not sure where it says he only tried a vague email, but in that case, yes, you’re right, it absolutely does. Doesn’t mean the official process is adequate. To be clear, I don’t think this is a product that should be sold directly to patients, at least not currently or any time soon. But the likely outcome of stopping them isn’t “Fecal transplants become more widely available after a reasonable and appropriate amount of money/time/effort gets spent testing and approving it.”
Exactly. Adequate or not, one can make such processes work for oneself. Like submitting a proposal in a way that can’t be ignored and must be aknowledged.
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Response times to IND requests are legally mandated with lots of mandated time steps along the way. They’re all responded to, no matter how stupid or lacking in detail. There’s even different lighter processes for individual researchers vs full out trials.
The blurb “So I continued as is,” sounds like he just ignored the process because it was easier.
The FDA cannot just ignore you, its just not a thing.
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If he wins and implements Schedule F, he can just ask the FDA to approve it for whatever cures he wants. Just fire anyone who will not go along.
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I’m not disagreeing, but this is mostly orthogonal to what I’m trying to say.
