CONVERSATIONS THAT MATTER
A C. difficile infection is a common reaction to your microbiome going off the rails from taking a course of certain antibiotics.
C. diff., for short, is a species of Gram-positive spore-forming bacteria accumulating in your gastrointestinal tract. The symptoms can be diarrhea, fever, nausea and abdominal pain.
There are a number of treatments. Some work. Some don’t 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. Fecal transplantation is not readily available. It comes with a wide range of challenges. For one, 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 changing the microbiome can 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 research underway in treating your well-being by re-engineering the bacteria that lives in your intestinal tract.
Simon Fraser University’s Centre for Dialogue presents Conversations That Matter. Join veteran broadcaster Stuart McNish each week for an important and engaging conversation about the issues shaping our future. Please become a Patreon subscriber and support the production of this program, with a $1 pledge at https://goo.gl/ypXyDs.