Diarrhoea may protect against colon cancer

22:00 10 February 03 NewScientist.com news service

The scourge of every traveller - diarrhoea - may protect against colorectal cancer. The bacterial toxin that causes the illness was also found to slow the growth of dividing colon cancer cells to a crawl, US researchers found.

Researchers now hope this mechanism can be harnessed to fight cancer - without the unpleasant side effects.

GianMario Pitari at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia and colleagues at the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota, looked at enterotoxins from Escherichia coli - the main cause of diarrhoea in people visiting or living in foreign countries.

They found that E. coli spreads itself by producing a toxin that mimics a natural colon process and provokes diarrhoea. However, the toxin also causes a flood of calcium into the affected cells, stopping colon cancer cells from replicating rapidly.

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