Can you get sick from your own dung?

[Line]

As a child and in school the always teah you to wash after you have a bowel movement. THey especially tell you to keep your hands cleans you wouldn't want to reingest any stool.


I want to ask ,does it really make sense that you that you could get sick off your own bowels? It's your own mess. If it's been inside you for 24 hours ,came out of you and didn't make you sick how could it then make you sick by contacting your skin or being reingested? What makes it so dangerous 2nd time around?

 

[iansmith]

Washing your hand after the you go to the bathroom is mostly a sanitary measure for other people rather than yourself. Several disease are transmitted throught the oral-fecal route due to lack of good hygiene.

You can get sicker from your own infection especially in the case of parasitic worms. Life cycle for some worms involved the ingestion of the eggs by the host.

Also, there other infection sites that the pathogen can get access to once it out. It might not get you sick while in it is in your intestine but it can cause disease if it get access to your eyes and other mucosal surface.

 

[Mattara]

It is not the stool itself that is dangerous. It is the bacteria on it, both from inside your body and external ones to my knowledge.

 

[Line]

It is not the stool itself that is dangerous. It is the bacteria on it, both from inside your body and external ones to my knowledge.

Well that's a given.

 

[Mattara]

Well that's a given.

If it was, then why are you ask in the first place? ;)

 

[selfAdjoint]

If the question is, can our own intestinal flora, egested with our stools, make us sick? And I think the answer is yes. The environment of the intestine is different from the environment of the organism, and a bug that is natural in the one can be a threat in the other. But I don't have any examples.

 

[DaveC426913]

If it was, then why are you ask in the first place? ;)

He is acknowleding that it is the bacteria that are in question i.e. "can the bacteria in your own stool make you sick?"

 

[3trQN]

Dentists recommend you keep your toothbrush at least 6ft from your toilet, to prevent contamination with particulates from flushes :yuck:

 

[Mattara]

Dentists recommend you keep your toothbrush at least 6ft from your toilet, to prevent contamination with particulates from flushes :yuck:

Mythbusters tested that and found that E.coli was all over the house and nothing that special with the bathroom:

http://dsc.discovery.com/fansites/mythbusters/episode/episode.html?clik=fanmain_leftnav

Popular science, but who cares :P

 

[DaveC426913]

I do not think that either the toothbrush or the Mythbusters experiment is adequate to answer the question of whether eating stool is going to make you sick.


Intuitively, I'm sure it would, but I don't know actually how it would make you sick, but I do know the following factoids that might help:

1] immuno-topologically-speaking, our bodies are a doughnut - the intestinal tract is medically considered to be outside the body.

2] the contents of our bowels are very poisonous to us (and, taking into account point 1], we can say that the contents of our bowels are not actually in us). Perforation of the GI tract spills the contents into our body cavity. Painful death comes from massive infection within fifteen minutes.

3] The teeth are the one place in the body where our innards (i.e. bone) protrudes into the outer world. The tooth/gum interface has our innards exposed to the world - it is not protected by the thick layer of bacteria-proof skin. This is why it is so important to floss.

4] And finally, even if there's no infection, a massive enough infux of bacteria in the stomach can overwhelm our body's ability to deal with it. Our body will attempt to purge it by opening the floodgates - either
a] reverse peristalsis (puking), or
b] diarrhea
Both lead to massive fluid and electrolyte loss. This is what getting sick is. Worse, if not checked, it can lead to further complications, up to and including heart troubles (due to electrolyte loss).

 

[pitchharmonics]

There are bacteria in feces that cause cancer.

 

[Line]

Wait so a simple opening in my intestines could kill me in 15 minutes?

 

[hypatia]

No line it can't, tho {toxic} shock can hit pretty quickly. But even with prompt medical care, the out come is often very poor. Depending on your body, you could live for several agonizing days befor death.

 

[DaveC426913]

No line it can't, tho {toxic} shock can hit pretty quickly. But even with prompt medical care, the out come is often very poor. Depending on your body, you could live for several agonizing days befor death.

Retracted. I got my numbers mixed up.

 

[Line]

Now you're gone if one of your insestines opens inside your body.

 

[Moonbear]

There are bacteria in feces that cause cancer.

Blanket statements such as this need to be supported. Provide a reference for the claim, or at the very least, specify which bacteria you are talking about so someone else could look it up for verification.

 

[Evo]

I looked it up the other day, but got side tracked from responding. There is no proof that bacteria causes cancer, but it is being studied. They should have answers they're hoping an a few years.

As one scientist said, rather than a high bacteria count being the cause of cancer, it could be that the cancer has caused an environment conducive to higher bacteria growth. They do not know.

I can try to post links tomorrow.

 

[jim mcnamara]

Helicobacter pylori is associated with stomach cancer.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=2059685&dopt=Abstract

 

[Evo]

Helicobacter pylori is associated with stomach cancer.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=2059685&dopt=Abstract

They are studying it, the study has not been concluded.

 

[Astronuc]

2] the contents of our bowels are very poisonous to us (and, taking into account point 1], we can say that the contents of our bowels are not actually in us). Perforation of the GI tract spills the contents into our body cavity. Painful death comes from massive infection within fifteen minutes.

Peritonitis -
http://www.umm.edu/altmed/ConsConditions/Peritonitiscc.html
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/001335.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peritonitis

Soldiers who get abdominal wounds are at risk for peritonitis.

As for E. Coli, I was in a group of students who drank contaminated water. I was fairly ill, but others were severely ill, and some required hospitalization.

I think Helicobacter pylori are implicated in stomach ulcers.
http://digestive.niddk.nih.gov/ddiseases/pubs/hpylori/

There may be a correlation between H. pylori and cancer in the sense that condition of stomach tissue with which one is more susceptible to H. pylori infection also renders it susceptible to cancer. However, that certainly does not mean that H. pylori 'causes' cancer. On the other hand, lesions may be more susceptible to cancer and therefore there could be an indirect cause. But the title "evidence from a prospective investigation" suggests a study in progress to which Evo alluded.

 

[pitchharmonics]

Sorry about that! I learned about this in microbiology last semester.

http://www.bact.wisc.edu/Bact330/Hpylori.html

http://digestive.niddk.nih.gov/ddiseases/pubs/hpylori/

my original statement is not 100% objective, but I think its possible. You wash your hands, somehow reminants of poo may get caught in fingernail...(dont ask me how, its possible)... and cells get infected through transformation or conjugation and then you got cells programed to multiply forever... i don't know much but don't put me down. heck, Helicobacter pylori has been found in feces, and the world health organization is calling it a class 1 carcinogen, which means cancer causing agent.

 

[Line]

Are you guys sying that most everybody has E.coli in their house. Does spraying 409 and household sprays kill viruses and most germs?

 

[DaveC426913]

The object of cleanliness is *not* to *eliminate* bacteria. Eliminating germs merely paves the way for more destructive bacteria. This is why antibacterial soap is a bad idea. (cue the antibacterial soap = good/bad thread digression...)


What you want to do is keep them at bay, but not so much that you lower your immune system and leave yourself vulnerable.

This, by the way, is why even conscientious moms let their babies eat dirt.

 

[Schrodinger's Dog]

Indeed in recent years it has been suggested, although not entirely without controversy that one reason why conditions like asthma have become more prevalent is that the environment children grow up in is just too clean, and our immune system no longer get's the rigorous testing it once did when we ate worms and dirt , thus there is more tendency for the immune system to overreact. There is a treatment for asthma I believe being tested that injects the patient with a virus that keeps the immune system "on guard " and thus reduces the chances of it going into overdrive and asthma occurring.

Babies it appears some times eat their own faeces I wouldn't recommend it though, unless you are a rabbit or one of the members of the rodent familly that benefit from giving that celulose another hammering fom their digestive enzymes, if you were a rabbit though, I would be surprised to see you posting on PF, so the point is pretty redundent

 

[NoTime]

Indeed in recent years it has been suggested, although not entirely without controversy that one reason why conditions like asthma have become more prevalent is that the environment children grow up in is just too clean, and our immune system no longer get's the rigorous testing it once did when we ate worms and dirt , thus there is more tendency for the immune system to overreact. There is a treatment for asthma I believe being tested that injects the patient with a virus that keeps the immune system "on guard " and thus reduces the chances of it going into overdrive and asthma occurring.

Babies it appears some times eat their own faeces I wouldn't recommend it though, unless you are a rabbit or one of the members of the rodent familly that benefit from giving that celulose another hammering fom their digestive enzymes, if you were a rabbit though, I would be surprised to see you posting on PF, so the point is pretty redundent

Eh! What's up Doc
Saw an article recently, related to asthma, on the differences in immune system activity between lab raised mice and wild field mice. The lab mice have lower activation of the immune system with much of the response directed to the inflammation type pathway, while field mice had much higher system activity more directed to cellular mediated responses.

Personally, I would say there is something to this idea of too much cleanliness.

 

[Evo]

I don't believe you can build an immunity to things you're not exposed to. If you live in a sterile environment, you'd be more likely to get sick when you venture into the real world. Someone correct me if I am wrong here, this is purely my opinion.

I got over my allergy to cats by being around them all the time. They no longer make me sneeze or cause huge swollen welts. And I used to be deathly allergic to them. Dust and pollen, however, still make me sneeze and will swell my eyes. So, maybe that kills my thoughts about the cat exposure.

Never mind.

 

[NoTime]

I don't believe you can build an immunity to things you're not exposed to. If you live in a sterile environment, you'd be more likely to get sick when you venture into the real world. Someone correct me if I am wrong here, this is purely my opinion.

Somethings seem to be built in, but for many things it has to learn as you say.

I got over my allergy to cats by being around them all the time.

A friend's kids were very allergic to poison ivy.
As I understood it, they were given pills with the poison ivy allergen in them.
Seemed to work more or less.
They still got it, but mild.

 

[aychamo]

Wait so a simple opening in my intestines could kill me in 15 minutes?

Well, if your intestines got open, and all those nice gram negative's got out and died, and released their endotoxin (lipid A component of their LPS), you could die within 5 hours. That's a problem with people who have septicemia with gram negatives.. If you kill the bacteria, you can kill your patient.

 

[aychamo]

Blanket statements such as this need to be supported. Provide a reference for the claim, or at the very least, specify which bacteria you are talking about so someone else could look it up for verification.

Yeah, I'v'e never heard anything of bacteria being linked with cancers.. Viruses, of course. But bacteria, no. I could see bacteria contributing in terms of perhaps constant inflammation on top of another initiating event.

 

[DaveC426913]

Aychamo: a question:

Why are bacteria labelled as gram- and gram+? Is there a fundamental property that it is relevant to group them like this?

 

[aychamo]

Aychamo: a question:

Why are bacteria labelled as gram- and gram+? Is there a fundamental property that it is relevant to group them like this?

Well, with bacteria, for the most part, if you just looked at them without doing anything to them, under the microscope most of them bascailly look the same (either as spheres or rods.) Gram staining is just a technique to help classify bacteria.

The http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gram_stain" helps microbioligsts distinguish between different bacterial species. Gram positive bacteria have a thick wall of peptidoglycan, which retains the violet color stain in the gram stain procedure (read the link above), and gram negatives don't have the thick outer wall of petidoglycan, so they don't retain the violet stain, and they instead pickup the counter stain, which is red.

So yes, it's the composition of their outer membrane (the amount of peptidoglycan) that allows them to be classified as gram positive or gram negatives.

I'm sure you've heard of "Strep throat" or a "Staph infection". Those are both (medically important) gram positives (and there are many others, like Clostridium botulinum (which causes botulism, the food poisoning, etc). And there are a ton of medically important gram negatives (ie, E. Coli, Haemophilus influenza [what you have the Hib vaccine for], Psuedomonas, N. ghonorrhea, etc.)

Gram negatives are especially dangerous because they have what's called an "endotoxin." It doesn't actually hurt you until the bacteria is dead. When a gram negative dies, it releases, from its LPS layer (lipopolysaccharide), a Lipid A component (which is the endotoxin) that wreaks havoc on your body. That's what I was talking about earlier when I said if you have a patient with gram negative bacteremia (baceria in the blood) and you kill all the bacteria, they will release the lipid A, and the patient can die in 5 hours! I'm not sure what you do in terms of treating the patient in that case.

I'm only a 3rd sem medical student, so I'm sure some of the microbiologists on the board will murder my explanations and explain things better :)

Aychamo

 

[aychamo]

I don't believe you can build an immunity to things you're not exposed to. If you live in a sterile environment, you'd be more likely to get sick when you venture into the real world. Someone correct me if I am wrong here, this is purely my opinion.

I got over my allergy to cats by being around them all the time. They no longer make me sneeze or cause huge swollen welts. And I used to be deathly allergic to them. Dust and pollen, however, still make me sneeze and will swell my eyes. So, maybe that kills my thoughts about the cat exposure.

Never mind.

Yes, you need to be exposed to something (ie, an antigen) to be able to build an immunity (antibody) to it.

 

[aychamo]

I think Helicobacter pylori are implicated in stomach ulcers.
http://digestive.niddk.nih.gov/ddiseases/pubs/hpylori/

There may be a correlation between H. pylori and cancer in the sense that condition of stomach tissue with which one is more susceptible to H. pylori infection also renders it susceptible to cancer. However, that certainly does not mean that H. pylori 'causes' cancer. On the other hand, lesions may be more susceptible to cancer and therefore there could be an indirect cause. But the title "evidence from a prospective investigation" suggests a study in progress to which Evo alluded.

You're right. In med school they teach us that H. pylori is essentially the cause of like 90% of GI ulcers. People used to think that it was stress, but it was demonstrated that H. pylori was the culprit. Stress can precipitate the problem though, of course.

And yes, chronic inflammation due to a chronic infection can help form a cancer. If you are exposed to some carcinogen, and then have chronic inflammation, you can get cancer. It's freaking crazy how they go hand in hand.

I'm sure when the guy above said "bacteria cause cancer" he must have meant viruses, like Human Papilloma Virus, etc..

 

[Mk]

I like this aychamo guy, what have you studied? Microbiology?

 

[iansmith]

So yes, it's the composition of their outer membrane (the amount of peptidoglycan) that allows them to be classified as gram positive or gram negatives.

It's the presence or absence of a outer membrane that determines if it's a Gram negative or Gram positive. Gram postive do not have an outer membrane and Gram negative do.

Also, the stain is no good for certain type of bacteria with atypical cell membrane and cell wall and will be false positive for some eukaryotes such as yeast.