In February, the Infectious Diseases Society of America issued new guidelines for fighting Clostridium difficile, the hardy bacterium that can cause life-threatening diarrhea and whose dominance is sometimes a consequence of antibiotic treatment. The guidelines recommend for the first time that FMT (fecal microbiota transplant) be considered for individuals who have repeatedly failed standard antibiotics.

In a nice coincidence, Emory FMT specialists Colleen Kraft and Tanvi Dhere recently published a look at their clinical outcomes with C diff going back to 2012, in Clinical Infectious Diseases. They report 95 percent of patients (122/128) indicated they would undergo FMT again and 70 percent of the 122 said they would prefer FMT to antibiotics as initial treatment if they were to have a recurrence.

The Emory FMT team also had this case report on interrupting one patient’s history of recurrent UTIs (urinary tract infections). They are studying FMT in a situation separate from C diff infection, colonization by antibiotic resistant bugs after organ transplant, described in the video below. If you don’t like that video, you can try this one featuring Atlantic science writer Ed Yong.