Safety of probiotics: comparison of two popular strains

Mounting clinical evidence shows that nutritional supplements of live micro-organisms (probiotics) have health advantages to humans.The appeal of probiotic therapy lies in the fact that it not only represents a non-invasive attempt to recreate natural flora rather than a disruption of nature, but it is also an approach that is both cheap and effective.However, the concept of willingly ingesting live bacteria remains somewhat counterintuitive.Although probiotic therapy is generally considered harmless, rare reports of systemic infections involving probiotic bacteria have raised clinical concerns.We therefore conducted a scientific review of the safety of these organisms.For the purpose of this review, we assumed therapeutic effectiveness and concentrated primarily on evaluating the safety of this treatment.Although many such reviews exist, previous authors have taken a uniform approach-they have mostly reported anecdotal case reports of infection or infection rates with the strain under investigation and then generalised their findings to all probiotics.We have tried to isolate the different safety profiles of diverse probiotic strains.