Monday Meh, News You Can Use edition

(A reminder that there are worse jobs than mine out there.)

 By David Glenn
When Carolyn Edelstein’s friends and family gathered for Thanksgiving in 2012, the conversation kept turning to feces.

Ms. Edelstein, a graduate student at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, had recently seen a close friend suffer through an infection with Clostridium difficile, a bacterium that can cause severe and sometimes fatal diarrhea. After several rounds of antibiotics failed, her friend finally turned to an experimental treatment: a stool transplant.

The procedure is just what it sounds like. Fecal material from a healthy donor is placed into the patient’s intestines via colonoscope, enema, or a tube routed through the patient’s nose. . . . .

 "If you’d told me a year earlier that I’d be leaving school to run a nonprofit stool bank, I wouldn’t have believed you," Mr. Burgess says. "But I think this is an opportunity to make a real dent in the C. diff. epidemic, and also to move forward with the science of the human microbiome."

The full text article from the Chronicle of Higher Ed requires a login, but I believe I've captured the essence of the report here.

I guess one good thing about working at a stool bank is that your boss couldn't realistically ask you to have lunch at your desk....