The occurrence of Clostridium difficile in nine wastewater treatment plants in the Ticino Canton (southern Switzerland) was investigated. The samples were collected from raw sewage influents and from treated effluents. Forty-seven out of 55 characterized C. difficile strains belonged to 13 different reference PCR ribotypes (009, 010, 014, 015, 039, 052, 053, 066, 070, 078, 101, 106, and 117), w...

Until the emergence of Vibrio cholerae O139 in 1992, toxigenic strains of V. cholerae O1 were considered to be the only causative agents of epidemic and pandemic cholera (3). Molecular studies using pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (4), ribotyping (3), enterobacterial repetitive intergenic consensus sequence (ERIC)-PCR (1), and restriction fragment length polymorphism analysis of the CTX geneti...

The association research platform MYTOX "Mycotoxins and Toxigenic Moulds" held the 5th meetingofitsInternationalSymposiuminGhent,Belgiumon11May2016.[...].

The effects of two Iranian medicinal plants including Zataria multiflora and Geranium pelargoniumwere evaluated on growth-inhibiting of some toxigenic fungi such as Aspergillus flavus, A. parasiticus, A.ochraceus and Fusarium verticillioides. In this study, standard Z. multiflora and G. pelargonium essentialoils (EOs) were diluted in 0.01% dimethyl sulfoxide. Different dilutions of Z. multiflor...

Materials Multicenter, prospective, observational study from February 3 to April 3, 2014. We included all adult critically ill patients of 26 CCUs of Spain who had diarrhea. All feces samples were sent to the reference laboratory and we considered CDI when cytotoxicity in cell culture or toxigenic culture were positive. The ribotypes were determined by PCR. Incidence of CDI, clinical characteri...

Clostridium difficile–associated diarrhea (CDAD) is a unique hospital infection that occurs almost entirely in patients who have received previous antimicrobial treatment. Although not conclusively proven, the normal gastrointestinal flora is presumably disrupted by antimicrobials, which, in turn, enables ingested spores of toxigenic C. difficile to colonize the colon, produce toxins, and cause...

Toxigenic cyanobacteria are photosynthetic prokaryotes that are most often recognized in marine and freshwater systems, such as lakes, ponds, rivers, and estuaries. When environmental conditions (such as light, nutrients, water column stability, etc.) are suitable for their growth, cyanobacteria may proliferate and form toxic blooms in the upper, sunlit layers. The biology and ecology of cyanob...