Hospital staff spend a significant amount of time working to protect patients from acquiring infections while they are being cared for in the hospital. They employ various methods from hand hygiene to isolation rooms to rigorous environmental sanitation. Despite these efforts, hospital-onset infections still occur—the most common of which is caused by the bacterium Clostridioides difficile, or C. diff, the culprit of almost half a million infections in the U.S. each year.
Surprising findings from a study in Nature Medicine suggest that the burden of C. diff infection may be less a matter of hospital transmission and more a result of characteristics associated with the patients themselves.
The study team, led by Evan Snitkin, Ph.D. and Vincent Young, M.D., Ph.D., both members of the Departments of Microbiology & Immunology and Internal Medicine/Infectious Diseases at University of Michigan Medical School and Mary Hayden, M.D. of Rush University Medical Center, leveraged ongoing epidemiological studies focused on hospital-acquired infections that enabled them to analyze daily fecal samples from every patient within the intensive care unit at Rush University Medical Center over a nine-month period.
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