Everyone else is literally flushing money down the toilet.
But not Eric, a 24-year-old research assistant at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. No, Eric gets $40 to take a dump and the satisfaction of knowing that his dump will go to save lives. I swear this is real and not a joke.
You see, Eric has quite close to perfect poop. CNN caught up with Eric (even while he was taking a shit) and discovered how his feces helps to produce treatments for patients suffering from Clostridium difficile, which is an infection that kills 15,000 Americans a year and sickens half a million people.
Via CNN:
A hundred trillion bacteria live inside your gut, some good, some bad. When patients take antibiotics for infections, sometimes they fail to work; good bacteria gets killed off while bad bacteria — C. difficile — grows unchecked.
The life-saving bacteria from the guts of people like Eric can help. When their healthy microbes are placed inside the intestines of a sick person they can chase out harmful C. difficile bacteria. It’s called a fecal transplant. The treatments are administered bottom-up, through a colonoscopy, or top-down, through a tube in the nose.
So you get $40 and help save lives just for dropping a deuce! So why isn’t everyone doing it? Well, only about three percent of people have the right kind of poop to donate. Eric had to undergo a huge analysis before donating and there are a ton factors that go into it:
There is a laundry list of factors that would disqualify a donor: obesity, illicit drug use, antibiotic use, travel to regions with high risk of contracting diseases, even recent tattoos. His stools and blood also had to clear a battery of laboratory screenings to make sure he didn’t have any infections.
Over the past two and a half months, Eric has donated 10.6 pounds of poop donations over 29 visits. That is enough feces to produce 133 treatments for patients and has earned him about $1,000 in his pocket.
You can watch the CNN segment here.
