Fecal transplants in puppies cure 93% of recurring diarrhea cases

Burgeoning method to transfer healthy microbes to the sick gets vetted for pets.

Beth Mole – Mar 24, 2016 11:25 am | 59

Fecal transplants have gone to the dogs—literally.

A veterinarian in Palmetto, Florida this week revealed a technique that uses poop transfers to successfully treat service puppies in-training that suffer from recurrent diarrhea, a common problem for dogs kept in kennels. The method reportedly cured 87 percent of dogs in the first round and 93 percent of those needing a second treatment.

The veterinarian—Kevin Conrad, head of Palmetto’s Southeastern Guide Dogs—said that he and his colleagues began looking into the treatment as a way to cut costs for common gastrointestinal problems that are often caused by bacterial infections that shed from puppy to puppy.

As in humans, the usual treatment is wolfing down rounds of antibiotics until the symptoms clear, which gave Conrad pause.

“We see 250 dogs a year, and there were a lot of repeat offenders with symptoms not going away,” Conrad told the Bradenton Herald. “We’d either repeat antibiotics or adjust their feeding. It could take days, weeks, or months to get one dog feeling better, and I knew there had to be an easier process.”

By digging into the data on fecal transplants—which are highly effective at treating dogged gut infections, such as Clostridium difficile, in humans—Conrad realized that treatment didn’t have to be that rough. Such transplants generally work by using poop, laden with a helpful community of microbes, to restore disorderly microbial communities in the gut and elbow out harmful germs.

In Conrad’s procedure, veterinarians simply take stool from healthy dogs, screen it, liquefy it, and then inject it into a sick dog’s intestines with a feeding tube inserted in their rear. The screening process Conrad uses is simple, mostly culturing some of the microbes in lab to check for certain types of bacteria.

Within 12 to 24 hours, the puppies’ symptoms start clearing up, Conrad said. He’s now using the method to treat adults and pregnant dogs.

“So what we tried is to do a fecal transplant on a pre-litter mom while she is pregnant and she’s dropping a whole litter of puppies without diarrhea issues. So now we are not only treating it but preventing it,” he said. “Now what we’ll find out is, ‘have we cured diarrhea throughout the dog’s lifetime?’”