Hi forum. I'm a dilettante when it comes to the microbiome, but on HumanMicrobes and its struggles to find adequate donors, I have some feedback to offer.
For one, the result that most donor samples are unhealthy should not be a surprise. Mailing your stool sample to a random address in the slim hopes of a payout is not something healthy people generally do. The fundamental issue you're having is that healthy people, in all instances, stick to the norms and conventions of society and ignore everything outside of a pretty narrow window. And for something as fringe as FMT, even one of their friends introducing them to it would not be enough. This has been pointed out before, but your ideal donor probably lives a charmed life and they likely don't even need the money which supplying samples could provide them. Your typical demographic for offering up stool is much closer to the sort of person who sells his plasma than, say, those who donate their blood. Selling any part of your body is an act of desperation in most cases. You unintentionally attract the least healthy people in society.
Second, the hassle of mailing a sample is too great for anyone who isn't motivated by a monetary reward. Put another way, they're basically playing the poop lottery hoping they're lucky enough for their sample to pass. And just like the real lottery, the likelihood of getting chosen is miniscule. Conjure up a mental image of the average lottery player in your mind, or the average bingo player, and imagine that as your stool donor. That's a huge issue.
I believe M. Harrop is too hasty in his conclusions about the public health. It's bad -- but it's not 1 in 23,000 bad (given an even sample of the population). This method just attracts an unhealthy set of donors. The type of people you want don't even know you exist -- even if you send them an email or DM, they won't recognize your existence. The only way you could reliably attract college-aged atheletes, for instance, is through the university apparatus via things like paid samples for research which compensate generously to drum up interest. This would kill many birds with one stone: You target the exact group of people you want, screening/collection facilitated due to being in-person, everyone is paid so you get tons of donors, etc.
Now, that's a dream scenario. But if donor quality is of the utmost, sourcing directly from your preferred demographic is obvious. So I want to ask, has anyone done a deep-dive on the logistics of this? Has it been tried before? There's a clear demand for quality donors which is not being met by the current market; the university path might be our way to rectify that.
For one, the result that most donor samples are unhealthy should not be a surprise. Mailing your stool sample to a random address in the slim hopes of a payout is not something healthy people generally do. The fundamental issue you're having is that healthy people, in all instances, stick to the norms and conventions of society and ignore everything outside of a pretty narrow window. And for something as fringe as FMT, even one of their friends introducing them to it would not be enough. This has been pointed out before, but your ideal donor probably lives a charmed life and they likely don't even need the money which supplying samples could provide them. Your typical demographic for offering up stool is much closer to the sort of person who sells his plasma than, say, those who donate their blood. Selling any part of your body is an act of desperation in most cases. You unintentionally attract the least healthy people in society.
Second, the hassle of mailing a sample is too great for anyone who isn't motivated by a monetary reward. Put another way, they're basically playing the poop lottery hoping they're lucky enough for their sample to pass. And just like the real lottery, the likelihood of getting chosen is miniscule. Conjure up a mental image of the average lottery player in your mind, or the average bingo player, and imagine that as your stool donor. That's a huge issue.
I believe M. Harrop is too hasty in his conclusions about the public health. It's bad -- but it's not 1 in 23,000 bad (given an even sample of the population). This method just attracts an unhealthy set of donors. The type of people you want don't even know you exist -- even if you send them an email or DM, they won't recognize your existence. The only way you could reliably attract college-aged atheletes, for instance, is through the university apparatus via things like paid samples for research which compensate generously to drum up interest. This would kill many birds with one stone: You target the exact group of people you want, screening/collection facilitated due to being in-person, everyone is paid so you get tons of donors, etc.
Now, that's a dream scenario. But if donor quality is of the utmost, sourcing directly from your preferred demographic is obvious. So I want to ask, has anyone done a deep-dive on the logistics of this? Has it been tried before? There's a clear demand for quality donors which is not being met by the current market; the university path might be our way to rectify that.
I don't know if his samples got lost in the flurry of the other 1 million at the time, or perhaps I missed a follow-up, which would be a shame because eventually his gut microbiome will likely get exposed to antibiotics at some point, along with the myriad of other factors that cause degradation in quality as age increases and life goes by.