C-Diff Kills 15,000 People A Year. Feces Donations May Change That

A bacteria that triggers deadly diarrhea and is one of the most common causes of U.S. infectious disease deaths is caused, in part, by antibiotics.

Clostridium difficile, or C-diff, is a toxin-producing microbe that infected almost a half-million Americans in 2011 and was linked to 29,000 deaths, according to a report released Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It said 15,000 deaths were “directly attributable” to C-diff infections. The bacteria is the leading cause of hospital-acquired diarrhea in the industrialized world. In the U.S., the rate of hospital-acquired C-diff infections doubled from 2001 to 2010, to 8.2 infections per 1,000 admissions.

Dr. Fernanda Lessa, a CDC medical epidemiologist and lead author of the report, called the control of C-diff infections a “national priority.”

“There is no vaccine for Clostridium difficile, and we know that good antibiotic stewardship is a big step forward in terms of its prevention,” Lessa said in a phone interview with The Huffington Post. “We had a publication last year showing that if hospitals can reduce 30 percent of antibiotic use, rates of C-diff can be reduced by 25 percent.”

Case studies from the Journal of Medical Case Reports and Open Forum Infectious Diseases point to the challenges of living far from a facility and of working with doctors who have limited experience in providing transplants.

CDC study co-author Dr. L. Clifford McDonald expressed hope about the experimental treatment, if only that it gets patients off the antibiotics that left them vulnerable to infection in the first place.

“Some people do just fine with the antibiotic treatment,” said McDonald during the briefing. “But it is a problem that we’re using an antibiotic to treat a disease that really occurs because someone got an antibiotic in the first place.”

The Huffington Post