When Emily Taylor was desperately sick with a bacterial infection that ravaged her gut, she found an unlikely cure: her father’s stool. Welcome to the miraculous world of fecal transplant, which has been found to be amazingly curative for certain intestinal disorders.
Radical as it sounds, fecal transplant is just one example of a game-changing way of thinking about health and disease, and it’s taking the scientific and medical worlds by storm. A storm of bugs, that is. Researchers are looking to the human microbiome—the vast colonies of bacteria that live in and on just about every part of our bodies—for the secrets to understanding and treating a range of diseases, from rheumatoid arthritis and inflammatory bowel disease to type 2 diabetes and cancer.
Wendy Kagan reported on the vast colonies of bacteria that may hold the key to out health in “The Bug Cure.”
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This article appears in September 2013.
