Fecal Transplant Death Mystery Solved
This summer, two people became ill after a poop transplant, and one of them died. Experts explain what went wrong and why the procedure should continue.
In June 2019, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced that two people who received fecal microbiota transplants (FMTs) — also known as a poop transfer, which is often used to treat people with serious gut infections — contracted an antibiotic-resistant strain of E. coli, and that one of those people had died. Mystery surrounded the FDA’s cryptic statement, which provided few details about where the treatments were done and how they had gone so wrong.
Today, those questions are answered in an article published in the New England Journal of Medicine by scientists at Massachusetts General Hospital. The two men were enrolled in different clinical trials at the Boston hospital but received transplants from the same donor. Alarmingly, 22 other people received FMTs from that donor; at least five of those people showed signs of the antibiotic-resistant bacteria in their stool, although none of them reported any symptoms of infection.
FMTs involve taking a poop sample from a healthy person and transferring it into a sick person with the goal of repopulating their gut…
