Disparate prevalence of toxigenic and nontoxigenic Clostridium difficile among distinct adult patient populations in a single institution.

Disparate prevalence of toxigenic and nontoxigenic Clostridium difficile among distinct adult patient populations in a single institution. J Med Microbiol. 2016 Sep 6; Authors: Clarridge JE, Harrington A Abstract Clostridium difficile (CD) disease remains a costly and important hospital associated infection. Although nontoxigenic CD is detected by some CD testing methods, can interfere with some detection algorithms and has been suggested as a treatment for CD disease, little is known about the relative occurrence of toxigenic and nontoxigenic CD in a single institution. We used both chromogenic and selective agar medium to recover Clostridium difficile (CD) isolates and a molecular method to detect the toxin B gene from over 2400 fresh unformed stool specimens with isolates further tested for the toxin B gene. We recovered 74 nontoxigenic and 306 toxigenic CD isolates for which a collection site could be assigned. The frequency of recovery of toxigenic and nontoxigenic CD for each hospital location and the ratio of toxigenic to nontoxigenic CD were calculated. Although the overall prevalence of toxigenic and nontoxigenic CD was 12.7% and 3.1%, respectively, on some wards 48% of all CD were nontoxigenic while on other wards, 5% were nontoxigenic. The disparate ratios of nontoxigenic CD to toxigenic CD presented here for the various "groups" within the adult Veteran population is important to the on-going discussion and reexamination ...
Source: Journal of Medical Microbiology - Category: Microbiology Authors: Tags: J Med Microbiol Source Type: research