Every so often a news story comes along with a nearly infinite capacity for humor.  I saw one today I couldn’t resist.

But first a little backstory.

It’s no secret that we are a buggy species.  You would be shocked to find out how buggy, though.  Some estimates are we carry one hundred trillion bacteria in and on us.

Those bacteria outnumber our own cells.  Think about that: you are more bacteria than person.

Apparently that adds up to five pounds of bugs.  So… you need to drop five pounds really fast?  Saturate your body in antibiotics!

Assuming that would actually work, it would eventually kill you, because we need some of those bugs.  You couldn’t digest food without them, for one.  Hence the probiotic yogurt craze, under the theory that if some bugs are good, more must be better.  Fortunately, you don’t need their ‘special’ bugs; all yogurt aids digestion (fortunately, because the probiotic stuff gives me wicked gas).

For roughly half of us, bacteria in the vagina will protect this beautiful organ from yeast infections and keep the vagina beautiful.  That gives the other half of us good reason to appreciate bacteria as well.

It works because bacteria and yeast are arch-nemeses from ancient times.  Even before Fleming isolated the penicillium mold, our ancestors used mold to treat infections, not knowing why it worked.

Or at least, it used to work.  Penicillin was once a wonderdrug, but over the decades most bacteria have evolved to laugh at it.

In fact, last year gonorrhea became an official superbug — it has evolved to the point where not much works against it anymore, except prevention… although it’s only time before it learns how to chew through latex and lambskin.

So that brings us to the point of this article.  Clostridium difficile is a bad bug that can cause havoc in your colon.  Diarrhea is the least of your worries with this guy.  He can kill you.

Some antibiotics can knock him out, but most make it worse by killing the good bugs that normally displace C. difficile.

And of course sticking antibiotics in factory meat and soap and sponges and cutting boards and shoe insoles and deodorant and God knows what else is accelerating the evolution of this and other superbugs.  But I digress.

A new treatment for treating particularly difficult C. difficile is to insert (somehow, I don’t want to know the details) fecal matter with good bugs into your colon.

Apparently it works very well, but the ick factor has people hesitating.  Understandably so.  So a microbiologist from the University of Guelph in Ontario has created… wait for it… artificial poop.

The good news is it is proving to be as effective as real poop.

The better news is she is calling it “rePOOPulate“.  Brilliant.

With such a fertile comic field, let’s plant some slogans and see what grows:

rePOOPulate: The best to you each morning.
rePOOPulate: Oh what a feeling!
rePOOPulate: Come smell what we’ve been cooking.
rePOOPulate: It’s finger lickin’ good.
rePOOPulate: There’s peanut butter in my chocolate!
rePOOPulate: There’s something special in the air.
rePOOPulate: Makes the going great!
rePOOPulate: Driven by what’s inside.
rePOOPulate: What’s in your wallet?

Hmm… there must be some other good ones out there…

So enter to win our rePOOPulate slogan contest in the comment section below!  All entries will be judged by a forum of your peers.

First prize winner could get a crock of rePOOPulate!

The runner-up might be entered into a draw for a free colon cleansing!