Clostridium difficileWIKIMEDIA COMMONS, CDC / LOIS S. WIGGS
Only 25 percent of hospital-associated Clostridium difficile infections can be traced to contact with a symptomatic patient in one particular hospital system, according to new research. Surveying recent diarrhea cases in one county in England, the study, published in PLoS Medicine today (February 7), throws the effectiveness of costly prevention strategies typically employed by hospitals into doubt.
The study is “ambitious and far-reaching in its conclusions,” said Kent Sepkowitz, a clinical epidemiologist at Sloan Kettering Memorial Hospital in New York who was not involved in the research. “It shakes the foundation of what we understood” about hospital-associated C. diff infections.
C. difficile is a spore-forming bacterial species associated with severe, sometimes fatal, diarrhea. It’s unclear how many healthy, asymptomatic adults carry C. diff in their ...
