New Scientist: New irritable bowel cure: drinking worms.
Mmm.
At the moment the concoction cannot be stored for long, so doctors or hospitals would have to prepare fresh batches of the eggs for their patients. But a new German company called BioCure, whose sister company BioMonde sells leeches and maggots for treating wounds, hopes it will soon solve the storage problem.
It plans to launch a product called TSO, short for Trichuris suis ova. Chief executive Detlev Goj says the company will apply for approval by the European Agency for the Evaluation of Medicinal Products as soon as the product is ready.
The pig whipworm was chosen as it does not survive very long in people. Patients would have to take TSO around twice a month. The human whipworm, which infects half a billion people, can occasionally cause problems such as anaemia.
The researcher noted that the rise in IBS and Crohn's disease over the past few decades correlated with our increasing success at wiping out intestinal parasites.
So he thought they might be good at stopping the diseases, and he was right.
The remission rate was 50 per cent for ulcerative colitis and 70 per cent for Crohn's, says gastroenterologist Joel Weinstock of the University of Iowa, who devised the treatment.
Something about this really reminds me of my go-nowhere topic on hormesis.... |
