Doctors from Imperial College London and the Medical University of Warsaw have published a letter online in the journal Gut, exploring the u

COVID-19 clears up rapidly after stool transplant to treat bacterial infection

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2021-07-06 12:00:07

Doctors from Imperial College London and the Medical University of Warsaw have published a letter online in the journal Gut, exploring the use of stool transplants to treat COVID-19 infection, after they used the procedure in two patients for another bacterial infection.

As well as being infected with Clostridioides difficile (a bacterial gut infection), both patients also happened to have COVID-19 infection, the symptoms of which cleared up rapidly after the stool transplant. Furthermore, while SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) may be detectable in stool for prolonged periods after the infection, researchers found that the virus was no longer detectable within stool after an apparently shorter period than is typically found.

Stool transplant, or faecal microbiota transplant (FMT) as it is formally known, aims to restore a healthy range of microbes in the gut (the microbiome) to boost the body’s immune response. The researchers describe using the procedure primarily to treat recurrent Clostridioides difficile infection in two people, just before initial symptoms of coexisting COVID-19 appeared.