Just a quick post here about the spreading of C. difficile among patients who visited healthcare settings but didn’t take antiobiotics. Traditionally C. difficile is thought to infect people whose normal microbiota was disturbed by antibiotics. It’s also the target of most experiments on fecal transplants since those have been shown to be very effective against this disease.
They key point of this story is that some recent cases have been observed that don’t appear to be hospital-acquired, or have occurred in patients that didn’t even have antibiotics. Worth keeping an eye on this one…
Very simplified article, I would say… By the way, does anybody know whether the probiotic microbes we ingest with yogurt – or wine, or beer :-) can survive after passing our extremely acidic stomach environment?