Study: Infection hits 1 in 100 hospitalized patients

Chicago Tribune

CHICAGO — A nasty germ that wreaks havoc in people’s guts is infecting hospital patients at rates much higher than previously estimated, according to a report released Tuesday.

The study found that slightly more than 1 in every 100 hospital patients are struck by Clostridium difficile, commonly called C. diff. The bacterium can cause severe diarrhea, nausea and abdominal pain and sometimes leads to colon failure and death.

What’s needed, experts suggest, are programs to improve cleanliness and hand-washing by hospital staff, as well as better control over antibiotics that can increase susceptibility to infections.

“This confirms what many of us have suspected: that this is a very widespread problem in virtually all hospitals,” said Dr. Stuart Johnson, an associate professor of medicine at Loyola University’s Stritch School of Medicine not involved in the research.

The study, which was conducted by the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology Inc. and has not been subjected to peer review, is the first to poll a large, nationally representative group of medical institutions on the extent of the bacteria in their facilities. All together, 648 hospitals in 47 states documented the germ’s impact on a single day this past summer.

Thirteen out of every 1,000 patients in the hospitals either had C. diff infections or carried the bug on their bodies — a figure at least 6.5 times higher than previous estimates from smaller studies. Of those patients, more than 94 percent had infections.

Extrapolating the findings to all U.S. hospitals, the researchers estimated that C. diff strikes as many as 7,178 hospital patients on any given day, and an average 301 people in this group will eventually die of complications related to infections.

Separately, an April study by the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality found that the hospital death rate for patients with C. diff was 9.5 percent, more than four times the overall 2.1 percent death rate.

“Our concern is that C. diff is not getting the attention it deserves,” said Kathy Warye, chief executive officer of the association of infection control practitioners.