Sell your poop for $40 a shot and save lives!

October 19, 2017 • 9:00 am

You can change “shot” to another word in the title, but this is a family friendly website.

On the subway to Cambridge yesterday, I saw this ad inside the car:

Now what do you suppose this is all about? Although it’s properly multicultural, how could you earn money to donate your stool, and save lives at the same time?

When I photographed the sign with my iPhone, a professor-type (this was at Harvard Square) told me he found it amusing as well, and suspected that “givepoop.org” was trying to isolate gut bacteria from different people as a way to cure those with intestinal problems.

He was right. The site, givepoop.org, leads to a Stool Donation Project run by Boston University. If you’re between 18 and 50 (I don’t qualify), take some tests, and agree to bring in stool samples regularly, you can get $40 a pop (or should I say “poop”) for your efforts.

It turns out that the microbiota in your stool might help cure those having colon inflammation due to the bacterium Clostridium difficile, which can be serious and even fatal. But transplants of bacteria from other people’s stools, as described below by the Mayo Clinic, seem efficacious:

Fecal microbiota transplant (FMT). Also known as a stool transplant, FMT is emerging as an alternative strategy for treating recurrent C. difficile infections. Though not yet approved by the FDA, clinical studies of FMT are currently underway.

FMT restores healthy intestinal bacteria by placing another person’s (donor’s) stool in your colon, using a colonoscope or nasogastric tube. Donors are screened for medical conditions, their blood is tested for infections, and stools are carefully screened for parasites, viruses and other infectious bacteria before being used for FMT.

Research has shown FMT has a success rate higher than 90 percent for treating C. difficile infections.

Now that is a useful treatment!

This study will undoubtedly involve finding out which combination of bacteria, or which strains, can be used as therapy to replace the flora in infected people.

Doing this several days a week for 60 days, at $40 a shot (pun can be made again), can earn you substantial money, and of course is less intrusive than blood donation. Here’s a video from the poop.com site explaining how fecal transplants work. While the idea of absorbing someone else’s feces might be distasteful, if it could save your life it’s well worth it.

 

56 thoughts on “Sell your poop for $40 a shot and save lives!”

    1. I’m 62. If we were in Boston, we could picket the lab and chant “We will not be deterred!”

  3. One day it will be a pill you can take and the Parma company will be knee deep in “money”.

    1. You could but afraid the transportation cost would exceed your $40 fee. Possibly if properly packaged it could be shipped surface in bulk?

      1. Don’t envy the Us customs person who has to inspect the contents ,also how would you describe the contents .

        PS i haven’t got any stools ,would a chair do.

        1. A long time ago, I sent some 10,000 year-old giant sloth turds (giant sloth, giant turds) to Salvador Dali (I thought it quite a Surrealist gesture). The poor woman at the counter thankfully didn’t inquire closely as to what “coprolites” maent on the customs declaration form, or she probably wouldn’t have allowed me to send the package.

          1. “Geological sample” isn’t a safe description. I had a particularly miserable three hours being screamed at in Swahili after trying to take 3 kilos of micropalaeontological samples in hold baggage. They eventually let me go when the realised that I did have a driver coming for me, I was willing to miss my flight, I wasn’t going to pay squeeze, and I was prepared to wait until after the end of their shift for the drier to arrive.
            What we didn’t consider was that there’s significant gold prospecting in the country, and 3 kilos of unidentified geological sludge could easily mask tens of thousands of dollars of “colours”. We had to get an export permit for the samples – sealed – from the government assay office to get the right paperwork for export, which took most of a day and a lot of sweaty offices without air conditioning. And a Swahili translator.

        2. also how would you describe the contents

          “Medical sample”. There’s an IATA and UN code for it (I forget what it is though), and prescribed shi(pp|tt)ing containers, but otherwise it’s pretty routine. It was quite normal for the medic to have a patient with an undiagnosed gut complaint and send a sample off to the doctors retained y their head office in Houston.
          I sent my biannual poo sample off for bowel cancer screening just a week or so ago. That’s within-country shipping by surface mail, so doesn’t need the full panoply of IATA documentation and packaging – just a scrape-sheet and a waterproof wrapper with the barcode on both.

  5. Strange that it hasn’t been approved by the FDA yet. I’ve been reading about it’s high success rate as a treatment for at least a couple of years now, and someone I know recently received a transplant for a recurring C diff infection.

    I will refrain from making any jokes. I’m simply above engaging in such shit.

  6. It would have been interesting in September when I wore an infusion device giving me a 1 hour dose of Penicillin every 4 hours for three+ weeks. My donations would have been somewhat bacteria free. But I also don’t qualify by age.

  9. C. Diff is a horrible little pathogen. The spores are resistant to alcohol, which is the main ingredient in hand sanitizers nowdays, so to prevent transmission in hospital,you really have to wash your hands thoroughly. When the infection is severe we used to have to take out the whole colon and leave the patient with a permanent ostomy or stoma bag. Fecal transplant has the potential to really revolutionize treatment for this problem. It’s not firstline treatment for the disease as of yet (which is treatment with antibiotics) but it should be number two!

      1. hehhehheh, Mr Darrelle !

        but … … Ms / Mr sciencemd68 is quite correct:
        … … persons stricken w Clostridium difficile, and especially ( and angeringly, I shall add ! ) withIN hospitalized settings, are extremely compromised.

        Who, truly, wants a .permanent. stoma or an ostomy ? Ever, have Any of Us, had to deal on a routine, hourly basis with one ? Utterly so sucks it does.

        Blue

        1. I’ve no doubts about any of that at all. Though I have no first hand experience with C. Diff or ostomy or stoma bags I can imagine how awful they are. I sincerely hope FMT turns out to be as effective a treatment as it seems it might be.

          1. It is by far the best treatment we have for the condition. Patients are completely healed in about 3/4th of cases.
            Note that the most common cause for             C. difficile pseudomembranous colitis is chronic antibiotic use.

          2. It is by far the best treatment we have for the condition. Patients are completely healed in about 3/4th of cases.

            Leaving 1/4 for whom the treatment is ineffective or incomplete. There’s a target for the rest of the pharmaceutical industry.
            Unfortunately, the drugs developed will be used mostly to increase the profit margins of farmers.

  10. I see a theme building here. First it was dog foul and now… Is this going to be a shitty day.

  11. The best joke is not the obvious one.

    “Clostridium difficile” … “treating C. difficile”

    In French, “C difficile” reads as SMS-style short for “C’est difficile”, which means “This is difficult”.

    For some reason I find that funnier than poop-related jokes.

    (Difficile is actually Latin here, and pronounced differently from the French word, though spelling and meaning are identical.)

    1. As a French speaker (non native) who had both an FMT and C. difficile, this is a perfect joke. Almost as perfect than the treatment.

  12. and of course is less intrusive than blood donation.

    Not really; you need to give blood samples just to qualify for the stool donation, which then entails dozens of trips to the donation center.

    With blood donation, the whole thing is done in one trip that takes under an hour.

  13. I’d join to help since C. diff is terrible, but I don’t live in Boston. I might not have a qualifying BMI too. And I’m not sure I’m capable of pooping on demand. The note that you have to ‘drop off’ several donations a week is pretty funny.

  14. Will different types of stool pay more than others ?.
    Would the rabbit type stool pay more than the stools you get after a dodgy kebab ?

  18. I’ve been reading a lot about this for many months. Apparently, it also helps people with Crohn’s disease, people with diabetes, and people who are obese or overweight.

  19. I took part in a similar study about 16 years ago. I got $50 for my sample and I bought my first cell phone with the money. I named the phone “Shit Bucket.”

  20. On the serendipity front: I had never heard of “Clostridium difficile” before, but ran across the term in while reading daily medical column called “Ask Dr. Roach” which appears in my local newspaper. He had a long discussion of this nasty sounding condition. Then I went to my computer to check Dr. Coyne’s latest and there it is again, “Clostridium difficile.” Coincidence? I don’t thinks so.

  21. HBO’s VICE has done a couple informative pieces on this new procedure. It seems to be very promising.

    1. Or, he has a low opinion of how an alien capable of communicating or travelling over light years would view us.

    1. It’s not an organ. It’s not a tissue.
      Does Canada have a business selling ice cream made from human breast milk?

      1. Technically no I guess it isn’t an organ or a tissue, but …

        As for the latter, I am not sure if selling human milk (or products thereof) is legal or not. I think it would have to be pasteurized.

        1. Both debates were had in the UK a few years ago. I forget how – or if – they were resolved. It is legal to sell unpasteurised milk here AFAIK, but it has to be clearly labelled (red top, or black top? I forget) and very few places sell it. Just the granola sandals and tofu powered computer brigade, with a healthy(?) contribution from crystal healers. I think the same bunch got together a self-expressing bunch of women to supply the ice cream machine. As I recall, they had problems with the low fat content making the ice cream pretty gritty.

  25. That’s funny- I was one of the first pediatric patients to receive an FMT. I have moderate Ulcerative Colitis that was impacted by *C. difficile*, and getting one (actually two) cured me of the bacteria, thus leading way into remission, which I have been in for a couple of years.

  26. Although it it used now for treating Clostridium difficile infections, it’s potential might be much greater. It is thought that intestinal microbiota is (are?) connected to obesity, DM type2 and the whole metabolic syndrome.

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