Hospital Acquired Infections and C. diff.

I think you will find, please check this as necessary, that C.Diff 027 is an alternate name for NAP1 (usually used in North America) and B1 or BI (elsewhere).

All these superbugs are bedeviled by the use of multiple names both for the disease and for the various strains.

C.Diff itself is often as "CDAD."

In the case of animal diseases many of which are zoonotic and impact on humans, BIG PIG in the United States was actually recorded changing the name of porcine circovirus to one of the many alternatives "for PR reasons."

It is almost as if somebody has something to hide.

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Regards
Pat Gardiner
Release the results of testing British pigs for MRSA and C.Diff now!
www.go-self-sufficient.com and http://animal-epidemics.blogspot.com/

Frank, C. Diff. is an enormous problem in Hospitals worldwide. It doesn't appear to be as big a problem in the US as MRSA, but neverthel ess, is catching up. Good point about blood pressure cuffs going from room to room and stethoscopes from Doctors, Nurses. Soap & water plus Clorox are our only remedy as you point out. Disposable bedside blood pressure cuffs are going to be the only answer to that problem at great expense. And, the Health Care costs go up and up. Perhaps one of our great manufacturers will produce a disposable one. I'm sure that is in the works as we write this. As yet, our Hospital doesn't have them but somewhere, I'm sure, they are available - just too costly.

I share your passion for the fight against C.Diff and the spore. I believe it takes approximately 30 minutes for bleach to kill the spore. If you take a look at test results on our web page at LINK check the scientific page, you will see that we can do it in 30 seconds. Email me through the details on the contact page if you wish to express an interest. Note that this is a proprietary product to our company only at this point.

Regards,
Sue Somerville
21st Century Global Solutions Limited

Your informative piece fails to mention that 3% of healthy adults and 80% of healthy infants have C. difficile in their GI tracts.
It also fails to mention that 40% of all meat products purchased in grocery stores contain C. difficile.
LINK
Couple that with the CMS quality measure requiring antibiotic administration within 4 hours for known or suspected pneumonia. These stringent and medically suspect federal "quality" guidelines kill off beneficial flora in the gut and often allow C. difficile that already exists in the colon to proliferate, causing an "infection" when one might not have otherwise existed.
Now explain to me how C. difficile infections are de facto evidence of "medical malpractice" (as this post is categorized).
What will it take to wake up the lay public and demonstrate that Clostridium difficile infections are often not "hospital acquired"?

I'm not a medical man, but having had pancreatic cancer followed by pancreatitis a couple of years later, this is kind of personal.

Probiotics are often prescribed in Britain. I ate bucketfuls

However, doctors at the University Medical Centre in Utrecht, Holland, reported that 24 out of 296 patients died during a study to find out whether friendly bacteria - known as probiotics - affected inflammation of the pancreas.

It kind of put me off yoghart for breakfast a bit.

Regards Pat Gardiner

Link to one article about Pat's story is here:
LINK
While the results of this study may be disconcerting, I don't think that one should say probiotics are necessarily harmful under all circumstances any more than one should generalize that penicillin is harmful to everyone under all circumstances - not just to those who are allergic to it.
I doubt that probiotics would have an effect on antibiotic-induced C. diff (but know of no studies to substantiate my assertion). I speculate that antibiotics would likely kill most of the bacteria ingested. Plus, as you mentioned, the bacteria don't kill off C. difficile spores, they only hold them in check - which is why C. diff infections are almost always antibiotic-related.
No intent to dominate the discussion. I just subscribe to a Google feed about medical malpractice and this post came across my e-mail. The classification of C. difficile infections as a Medicare "never event" is a raw nerve with me.

That's the one! Well Done.

It was reported in the UK mainstream press, but I have seen little since.

C.Diff seems to be a bigger problem in the UK than has been admitted. The method of collecting statistics inevitably leads to under reporting.

In the last few weeks, there have been several reluctant admissions that it is far more common in the community than hitherto thought. The hopitals having to deal with the problems even though they were not the direct cause.

So, we have the silly situation where the figures get better and the problems on the ground more severe. I make the connection between pigs who do get C.Diff 027 and community based human epidemics on the basis of geography.

Big pig areas such as East Anglia in England, Grampian in Scotland, Northern Ireland, Quebec and Ontario have had massive probems in the hospitals. That suggests Ohio and American pig country may be next.

But Holland, thick with pigs, has the problem cracked.

Anyone specially interested can see the problem traced in detail on a daily basis over a decade on the newsgroup uk.business.agriculture. A beer garden, but a useful one.

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Regards
Pat Gardiner
Release the results of testing British pigs for MRSA and C.Diff now!
www.go-self-sufficient.com and http://animal-epidemics.blogspot.com/

Whitecoat. Thanks for the link to the article about probiotics. I went to your blog. Impressive.