Jerusalem Post on Allergy and Fecal transplants

Some interesting tidbits in this Jerusalem Post article: Health Scan: Ungluing the complexity of allergy | JPost | Israel News (a bit overenthusiastic too but just thought I would point some of these lines /quotes out):

• “Studies in adults show that more than 90 percent of patients are cured following such therapy and, experts say, they have every reason to believe the numbers would be equally impressive in children.” – not sure this is true (i.e., the 90% cured level).
• In less than a decade, we’ll have lab-cooked poop that we can administer to restore balance in the guts of people with a wide array of conditions caused by the imbalance between good and bad germs.” OK – a bit overenthusiastic 
• But this is my favorite: “The concept is hardly new. The method originated with ancient Chinese healers who gave their diarrhea-ravaged patients “yellow soup,” a concoction of fecal matter and water. Thousands of years later, the delivery approach has evolved” – So – I have been writing and talking about fecal transplants for a while now (e.g., see this) and have linked them to coprophagy and poo tea and such but never heard of the yellow soup thing.

Author: Jonathan Eisen

I am an evolutionary biologist and a Professor at U. C. Davis. (see my lab site here). My research focuses on the origin of novelty (how new processes and functions originate). To study this I focus on sequencing and analyzing genomes of organisms, especially microbes and using phylogenomic analysis View all posts by Jonathan Eisen