Submitted via IRC for SoyCow4463
One patient has died and another became seriously ill after fecal transplants inadvertently seeded their innards with a multi-drug resistant bacterial infection, the Food and Drug Administration warned Thursday.
The cases highlight the grave risks of what some consider a relatively safe procedure. They also call attention to the mucky issues of federal oversight for the experimental transplants, which the FDA has struggled to regulate. In its warning Thursday, the agency announced new protections for trials and experimental uses of the procedure.
The FDA shared minimal details from the deadly transplants. Its warning only noted that the cases involved two patients who were immunocompromised prior to the experimental transplants and received stool from the same donor. Subsequent to the transplant, the patients developed invasive infections from an E. coli strain that was resistant to a wide variety of antibiotics in the penicillin and cephalosporin groups. The E. coli strain carried a drug-defeating enzyme called an extended-spectrum beta-lactamase (ESBL) [open, DOI: 10.1155/2012/625170] [DX], which generally cleaves a ring common to all the chemical structures of those antibiotics. When unnamed researchers who administered the transplant looked back at the donor stool, they found that the stool contained an identical ESBL-producing E. coli.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 18 2019, @01:13PM
Having had two relatives that had lap band surgery and seeing how it devastated the life of one and surgical complications in the other, I would put surgery at the bottom of the list of things to try to reverse obesity.Aside from radical changes in diet such as a 5-2 system where you fast for two days, eat well for 5, there is gastric balloon therapy which requires no surgery and is easily reversible, unlike surgical options. A balloon is orally inserted into your stomach and filled with saline solution to reduce the volume of food which can be eaten.