BACKGROUND Sporulation of Clostridium difficile during infection and persistence of spores within the gut could partly explain treatment failures and recurrence. However, the influence of antibiotics on sporulation is unclear. The objective of our study was to evaluate the impact of ciprofloxacin, metronidazole, piperacillin/tazobactam, tigecycline, and vancomycin on C. difficile sporulation in...

BACKGROUND  Clostridium difficile causes diarrhea that ranges from a benign, self-limiting antibiotic use-associated disease to a life-threatening pseudomembranous colitis. Clostridium difficile has rarely been isolated in extraintestinal infections. Our objective was to characterize clinical features and risk factors of these infections. METHODS Extraintestinal C. difficile infections (CDIs) w...

OBJECTIVES Clostridium difficile infection (CDI) is still a major clinical challenge. Previous studies have demonstrated multiple distinct C. difficile strains in the faeces of patients with CDI; yet whether true mixed CDI occurs in vivo is unclear. In this study we evaluated whether two distinct C. difficile strains could co-germinate and co-proliferate in an in vitro human gut model. METHOD...

BACKGROUND Treatment of community-acquired pneumonia (CAP) with newer fluoroquinolones may contribute to selection for Clostridium difficile. We studied the prevalence of C. difficile carriage and C. difficile infection (CDI) on admission, and nosocomial acquisition rates in patients hospitalized for CAP and compared different empirical treatment strategies. METHODS In a prospective study amo...

BACKGROUND ChromID Clostridium difficile agar (IDCd; bioMérieux SA, France) is a recently developed chromogenic medium for rapid and specific isolation of C. difficile. We compared the performance of IDCd with that of Clostridium difficile Selective Agar (CDSA). METHODS A total of 530 fresh stool specimens were collected from patients with clinical signs compatible with C. difficile infection...

BACKGROUND Current knowledge of the epidemiology of Clostridium difficile infection in Asia, and in particular the Greater Mekong Subregion, is very limited. Only a few studies from Thailand and Vietnam have been reported from the region with variable testing methods and results, and no studies from Lao People's Democratic Republic (PDR). Therefore we investigated the presence of C. difficile i...

Clostridium difficile infection (CDI) can trigger various responses, ranging from asymptomatic carriage to fulminant colitis. Hard-to-cure CDI, such as severe CDI, multiple recurrences of CDI, refractory CDI, and hypervirulent strains of C. difficile, require new treatments, although antibiotics such as metronidazole and vancomycin are the treatment of choice for initial and first relapsing CDI...

UNLABELLED Clostridium difficile is an important human-pathogenic bacterium causing antibiotic-associated nosocomial infections worldwide. Mobile genetic elements and bacteriophages have helped shape C. difficile genome evolution. In many bacteria, phage infection may be controlled by a form of bacterial immunity called the clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats/CRISPR-associ...

BACKGROUND Diagnosis of Clostridium difficile infection is controversial because of many laboratory methods, compounded by two reference methods. Cytotoxigenic culture detects toxigenic C difficile and gives a positive result more frequently (eg, because of colonisation, which means that individuals can have the bacterium but no free toxin) than does the cytotoxin assay, which detects preformed...

Over a five-month period 1239 unselected, routine faecal specimens from 856 patients were examined for Clostridium difficile. One hundred specimens representing 69 patients were culture-positive. Toxin was detected in the stool of ten. During the study period, there were 41 Salmonella, 12 Campylobacter and 9 Shigella infections. C difficile was isolated together with Salmonella from 12 patients...