Human Microbes, a US based ‘stool donor network,’ has a bizarre business detail. It is offering to pay individuals an incredible sum of ₹1.4 crore per year for daily poop samples. It’s currently focused on the USA and Canada but it does accept donors from across the world— if you can ship them your poop in dry ice. 

The Company Offers Rs 1.4 Crore for Your Poop: Saving Lives or Just a Business?

Human Microbes, founded by Michael Harrop in 2020, has based it’s vision on a rather unconventional approach to positive gut and mental health. It deems itself an entity focused on exploring the benefits of Fecal Microbiota Transplant (FMT), a procedure not widely recognised for it’s success but with limited repute in dealing with cases of gastrointestinal or metabolic cases. 

The Company Offers Rs 1.4 Crore for Your Poop: Saving Lives or Just a Business?
Image by Human Microbes

Dr. Adil Farooq Malik, consultant at Gastroenterology at Fortis Hospital, tells India today that FMT can treat Clostridium Difficile Infection (CDI). 

The procedure itself involves transferring healthy gut bacteria from one person to another by transferring the stool of a healthy donor into the gastrointestinal tract of a patient, letting it restore a balanced microbiome. 

Human Microbes, hence, is capitalising on these benefits. However, they have a very specific criteria that donors have to fit to be able to donate. They need to be young, athletic and mentally healthy. All these are titular points as the company believes in cultivating the procedure to be able to fix various physical and mental health issues. They need all their donors to be the very picture of health. 

After self assessment of possible donors, they also have to verify their eligibility by completing a screening questionnaire, completely verifying their stool type and physical fitness, sit for a video interview and complete a stool and blood test. Only after these steps will a donor be selected. 

Jane, an individual Human Microbes had worked with has come out to talk about how it’s FMT procedure helped her with her bipolar disorder, something she’d been suffering from for the last 20 years. 

Alex, her husband, is an ecologist. Both of them star in this video where they narrate their experience with FMT. To Alex, Jane’s bipolar disorder and subsequent manic episodes had been very traumatising on virtue of being unable to watch someone he loved so much go through something like that and Jane had, hence, taken the matter of her health into her own hands. She’d begun the FMT procedure by herself, converting donated stool into a biologically rich mixture that could then be transferred past her rectum into her colon. 

However, despite plausible breakthroughs, the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA), a federal agency of the Department of Health and Human Services has written a warning letter to Harrop, accusing the website of Human Microbes to be committing “serious regulatory violations concerning marketing and sale of faecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) products on the company’s website.”

It demands Human Microbes to “review and revise it’s marketing practises and ensuring compliance with all relevant laws and regulations.” 

“Failure to address these issues promptly could result in enforcement actions, including product seizure or injunctions,” FDA says. 

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