Gulp

I asked Khoruts what exactly is in the ‘probiotic’ products seen in shops now. ‘Marketing’, he replied. Microbiologist Gregor Reid, director of the Canadian Research & Development Centre for Probiotics, seconds the sentiment. With one exception, the bacteria (if they even exist) in probiotics are aerobic; culturing, processing, and shipping bacteria in an oxygen-free environment is complicated and costly. Ninety-five percent of these products, Reid told me, ‘have never been tested in a human and should not be called probiotic.’

Inflammatory bowel diseases – irritable bowel syndrome, ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s disease – are thought to be caused by an inappropriate immune response to normal bacteria; the colon gets caught in the cross fire. This time around, the IRB refused to approve the trial until the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) had approved it. And that’s just for the trial. Final FDA approval, the kind that makes the procedure available to anyone, is a costly process that can take upwards of a decade.

And in the case of faecal transplants, there’s no drug or medical device involved, and thus no pharmaceutical company or device maker with diverticuli deep enough to fund the multiple rounds of controlled clinical trials. If anything, drug companies might be inclined to fight the procedure’s approval. Pharmaceutical companies make money by treating diseases, not by curing them.

Most of what Khoruts says is delivered deadpan. ‘In Russia’, he told me, ‘if you smile a lot, they think something’s wrong with you.’ He has to remind himself to smile when he talks to people. Sometimes it arrives a beat or two late, like the words of a far-flung foreign correspondent reporting live on TV.

If one bought into the dangers of miasmas, it wasn’t much of a leap to buy into the dangers of one’s own internal sewage. Purveyors of laxatives and enema devices played up the connection, referring to the colon as ‘the human privy’, ‘an obstructed sewer’, ‘this cesspool of death and contagion’. Whorton’s book reproduces a magazine ad for the French laxative Jubol, showing tiny uniformed men on their hands and knees with scrub brushes and buckets inside a colon, like workers in the Paris sewers.100

Hydrogen sulphide is a reliable way to kill oneself – as well as the people who try to save you. In 80 percent of the hydrogen sulphide suicides recorded in the US, emergency personnel or good Samaritans have been sickened by the fumes when they tried to help. One suicide in Japan caused the evacuation of 350 neighbours

It is fitting that the Devil is said to smell of sulphur. Hydrogen sulphide is a diabolical killer. Its telltale rotten-egg smell, screamingly obvious at 10 parts per million, disappears at concentrations above 150 parts per million; the olfactory nerves become paralysed. Without the odour to warn them, co-workers and family members may rush into a manure pit to rescue the fallen

Instead, Secor suspected, the hydrogen spikes were the result of the decomposing, gas-bloated rat bursting inside the python. ‘One thing led to another.’ (Secor’s way of saying he popped a bloated rat corpse and measured the hydrogen that came off it.) Suspicion confirmed. The hydrogen level was ‘through the roof’. Secor had stumbled onto a biological explanation for the myth of the fire-breathing dragon. Stay with me. This is very cool.

Many plant-eating animals lack rumens, so some fermenting takes place in the cecum, an anatomical pouch at the junction of the small intestine and the colon. These same plant-eaters – horses, rabbits, koalas, to name three – tend to have a larger-than-average cecum. Pythons and boas do too, which struck Secor as odd, because they’re carnivores. Why, he wondered, would a meat-eater need a vegetation digestion unit? Secor theorised that perhaps these snakes had evolved ceca as a way to digest and take advantage of plant matter inside the stomachs of their prey.

‘Ungulates in the wild tend to go off and hide someplace while they ruminate’, DePeters explained. ‘If a lion walks by and hears a loud urrp...’ Sayonara, antelope.

United States v. Montoya de Hernandez set the precedent for the 1990 case of Delaney Abi Odofin, who spent twenty-four days in detention before passing the first of his narcotics-filled balloons. ‘An otherwise permissible border detention’, the Justia.com summary concluded, ‘does not run afoul of the Fourth Amendment simply because a detainee’s intestinal fortitude leads to an unexpectedly long period of detention.’