Clostridium difficile infection: it's a family affair.

tipped swab (Fisher Scientific) premoistened in Dey-Engley neutralizer (Becton Dickinson). The swabs were vortexed for 45 seconds in 200 piL of Dey-Engley neutralizer, plated onto prereduced C. difficile Brucella agar (CDBA), and cultured as previously described. For the fresh Clorox premoistened germicidal wipes only, an additional experiment was performed in which the inoculated site was wiped for 10 seconds and then sequentially imprinted onto 5 prereduced CDBA plates containing Dey-Engley neutralizer. All experiments were performed in triplicate. Figure 1 provides an illustration of the findings. Use of fresh Clorox premoistened germicidal wipes with 5 minutes of contact time consistently reduced C. difficile spores to undetectable levels at the inoculum site, with no transfer of spores to clean sites. In contrast, large numbers of spores were transferred to all four sequential clean sites by wipes moistened with the quaternary ammonium product or water (mean number of spores recovered from the fourth transfer site, 3 and 2.1 log10 CFUs, respectively). The used Clorox wipes transferred spores to all 4 sequential sites but in much lower quantities (mean, 0.4 log10 CFUs recovered from the fourth transfer site). Finally, fresh Clorox premoistened germicidal wipes transferred large quantities of spores (CFU too numerous to count) to 5 successive CDBA plates containing Dey-Engley neutralizer (i.e., minimal contact time with hypochlorite allowed because of rapid exposure to neutralizer).