C Difficile Essay

Clostridium difficile Clostridium difficile is a microbial bacterium that is also human pathogenic. C. difficile is usually found in a hospital environment, and in the form of endospores. Due to bad hygiene, it can be transferred from things like a bedpan or unsanitary surface into the body orally. It goes through the mouth and ends up in the intestines where it comes out of the endospore state and into its vegetative state. While in the intestine C. difficile starts to flourish and that is when it causes harm to the body. If C. difficile is introduced to a healthy body, the microflora in the intestines wouldn’t allow the C. difficile to flourish, but in a hospital environment where it is mostly found, many people are on antibiotics for other

difficile colitis is diagnosed by taking a stool sample and identifying toxins under the microscope. If the patient is diagnosed with the disease, the first step is usually to take them off of the other antibiotics they may be taking. Then, the doctor usually prescribes a different antibiotic; not the same as the one that caused it to grow. Antibiotics are usually a good enough treatment for C. difficile patients, but sometimes they don’t work. Or if they do work while the patient is taking them, the symptoms return once the antibiotic is not taken anymore. If the patient is taking antibiotics and the symptoms go away, they are watched for a few days to be sure. If diarrhea does return a few days after completion of the antibiotics, sometimes a fecal transplant is used as a treatment. In cases where C. difficile keeps returning after antibiotic use, fecal microbiota transplantation is usually recommended. It involves taking feces from a healthy donor, purifying it, and placing it back into the unhealthy patients gut via colonoscopy. It is a fairly inexpensive and reliable cure for C. difficile, and it still being studied, but so far has had very good outcomes. It mainly consists of transferring healthy gut bacteria from a healthy donor into the infected