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GHANA WEATHER

'Super poo donors' wanted

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Claudia Campenella, 31, works as a student support administrator at a UK university, and in her spare time she is a poo donor.
“Some of my friends think it is a bit weird or disgusting, but it doesn’t worry me. It’s very easy to donate and I just want to help with medical research. I’m glad to contribute.”
Her faeces, teeming with “good” bugs, will be put into the bowel of a sick patient to help their poorly gut get better.
Claudia knows her donation is extremely useful – that is why she does it – but is her poo extra special?
Scientists believe some people’s poo might contain an ideal mix of healing bacteria to fix gut diseases, making them super-donors.
Claudia says she wanted to become a donor because she had read that vegans might make particularly good candidates.
There’s no good evidence that vegan poo is better than any other human faeces, but experts are exploring what might make a stool “super”.
Dr Justin O’Sullivan is a molecular biology expert at the University of Auckland and he has been investigating the concept of super poo donors.
Our guts house millions of bugs that live inside us as a community. This diverse microbiome is unique to each us – no two are exactly the same.
Although faecal transplantation is still a relatively new field of medicine, evidence from the studies that have been done hint that some donors make the best poo for the job.
Dr O’Sullivan says: “We see transplants from super-donors achieve clinical remission rates of perhaps double the remaining average.
“Our hope is that if we can discover how this happens, then we can improve the success of faecal transplantation and even trial it for new microbiome-associated conditions like Alzheimer’s, multiple sclerosis and asthma.”
Dr Jon Landy is a consultant gastroenterologist for West Hertfordshire Hospitals NHS Trust and helps to co-ordinate their faecal transplant unit.
He agrees with the idea of a super-donor, but says finding one could be tricky.
“We do not understand yet what makes a super-donor, or why,” he said.
“We always make sure our donors are healthy and not carrying any disease, but we don’t test all of their microbiome to see what that is like.

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