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One transplant of fecal material from a volunteer - with its mix of healthy bacteria - resolved severe diarrhea in 13 out of 16 volunteers. Standard treatment with an antibiotic, in comparison, worked in four of 13 patients.

"I've done 90 of these now in the last four and a half years. In patient after patient who has failed multiple courses of antibiotic, if you give them a dose of stool, they get better," she told Reuters Health.

Keller and his colleagues compared three treatments in a small trial.

Thirteen volunteers with C. diff received a standard antibiotic, vancomycin, four times a day for 14 days. After 10 weeks, four were free of bacteria-related diarrhea.

Another 13 patients had the same drug therapy after drinking a solution to clean out the bowel, a process known as bowel lavage that is similar to what people go through if they are getting a colonoscopy. That worked in three cases.

The remaining 16 volunteers had a brief treatment with vancomycin, combined with bowel lavage, followed by the infusion of 500 milliliters of diluted donor feces through a tube that went into the nose, down the throat, past the stomach and into the small intestine.

In the three cases where that treatment failed, the doctors re-treated patients with fecal material from a different donor. That worked in all but one case.

Among the volunteers in the non-transplant groups who had a relapse of C. diff, 18 were later given a fecal transplant. It cured 15 of them, although four of the 15 needed two treatments.