(Sydney Morning Herald) It sounds like the opener for a comedy sketch whose authors got stuck at the toilet humour stage. It is, however, the deadly serious tagline of OpenBiome, a US-based stool bank that actively solicits donors, at $US40 a poop, to provide the raw material for its stock in trade, the faecal microbiota transplant (FMT).
FMT is a procedure whose ickyness, for many folk, runs off the scale. In standard form it means churning the faeces of carefully screened donors into a slurry, which is then squirted into the bowel via a colonoscope or enema, the aim being to repopulate healthy bacteria in guts ravaged by disease. For willing volunteers, Australia’s very own stool repository, Adelaide’s BiomeBank, formally opened its doors to public poo donations from late last year.
The procedure itself is attention-grabbing, but its entry onto the medical stage was nothing short of dramatic.