Hey, Quick Question: Why Aren't We All Selling Our Poop?
LatestIf your answer is “because nobody would want it,” you are wrong, because a fecal bank called OpenBiome will buy your poop to the tune of $13,000 a year.
From the Washington Post:
Since 2013, OpenBiome has been processing and shipping loads of it all over the country. The frozen stool is administered to patients who are very sick with infections of a bacteria called C. difficile. The bacteria can cause extreme gastrointestinal distress, leaving some sufferers housebound. Antibiotics often help, but sometimes the bacteria rears back as soon as treatment stops. That leads to a miserable, continuous course of antibiotics.
Si, difficile. OpenBiome pays donors “$40 a sample, with a $50 bonus if you come in five days a week. That’s $250 for a week of donations, or $13,000 a year.” Sounds amazing, let me quickly poop in a Tupperware and pay off the consumer debt I have accrued since moving to New York this October. Except, of course, there’s a catch: only about 4% of people they’ve screened are healthy enough to produce turds of a magnificence necessary to be made into miniature turd pills that magically bring other people back to health.
And, of course, there’s another catch: the screening process can cost up to $5,000 on its own.
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Guess I’ll just have to go back to doing what I normally do with my poop: pulling it out of the toilet with a ladle and whipping it, like a shot-put, into my magnificent backyard.
For more about stool banks, check “The Excrement Experiment,” from the New Yorker late last year.
Image via Shutterstock.