Gert van der Hoek
In Memoriam - Editor, Senior Moderator
Dangerous Gut Bacteria Move Outside Hospitals, Infect Kids
by TED BURNHAM
May 23, 2012
CDC
Colonies of Clostridium difficile look awfully nice, but they're definitely something you'd be advised to keep at a safe distance.
Infections with the bacterium Clostridium difficile hit record numbers in recent years. Now there's evidence the hard-to-treat infections are becoming a problem for children.
The infections often strike the elderly, especially those who've been taking antibiotics that clear out competing bacteria in people's intestines. People sickened by the bug have persistent diarrhea that can, in severe cases, lead to dehydration.
C. diff, as it's known, is resistant to common broad-spectrum drugs and used to lurk mainly in hospitals. But as NPR's Rob Stein reported in March, more and more people are contracting C. diff elsewhere.
Mayo Clinic researcher Sahil Khanna and his colleagues have found that children are contracting the disease at ever-higher rates, too. And most of them are being infected outside of hospitals. He presented the findings at the annual Digestive Disease Week medical conference ending today.
Although C. diff infections were first documented in the late 1970s, Khanna tells Shots, "there haven't been any studies of children in and outside the hospital." So he and fellow researchers examined data from Olmsted County, Minn., where they had access to detailed records for the entire community, going back decades.
What they found, Khanna says, is a huge increase in infection rates. Between 2004 and 2009, the rate of C. diff infections among children was a whopping 12 times higher than it was between 1991 and 1997. Most of the infected kids had been taking antibiotics, which was no big surprise. But what was surprising was that 75 percent of them became infected outside of the hospital.
Read more: NPR's Healthblog
thanks to MicrobeWorld
by TED BURNHAM
May 23, 2012
CDC
Colonies of Clostridium difficile look awfully nice, but they're definitely something you'd be advised to keep at a safe distance.
Infections with the bacterium Clostridium difficile hit record numbers in recent years. Now there's evidence the hard-to-treat infections are becoming a problem for children.
The infections often strike the elderly, especially those who've been taking antibiotics that clear out competing bacteria in people's intestines. People sickened by the bug have persistent diarrhea that can, in severe cases, lead to dehydration.
C. diff, as it's known, is resistant to common broad-spectrum drugs and used to lurk mainly in hospitals. But as NPR's Rob Stein reported in March, more and more people are contracting C. diff elsewhere.
Mayo Clinic researcher Sahil Khanna and his colleagues have found that children are contracting the disease at ever-higher rates, too. And most of them are being infected outside of hospitals. He presented the findings at the annual Digestive Disease Week medical conference ending today.
Although C. diff infections were first documented in the late 1970s, Khanna tells Shots, "there haven't been any studies of children in and outside the hospital." So he and fellow researchers examined data from Olmsted County, Minn., where they had access to detailed records for the entire community, going back decades.
What they found, Khanna says, is a huge increase in infection rates. Between 2004 and 2009, the rate of C. diff infections among children was a whopping 12 times higher than it was between 1991 and 1997. Most of the infected kids had been taking antibiotics, which was no big surprise. But what was surprising was that 75 percent of them became infected outside of the hospital.
Read more: NPR's Healthblog
thanks to MicrobeWorld