Question

1. What increases the chance of a patient acquiring a Clostridium difficile infection?

2. What is a common first-line and second-line drug used to treat C. difficile?

3. Extra Bonus Point - What does the stool of a C. difficile patient smell like? (I am not kidding, this is a real question)

Answer 1

The clostridium difficile is the gram-positive bacillus that use to cause antibiotic-associated diarrhea.

Patients who are in hospital for the long term may have this infection, this is spread through the fecal-oral route.

1) The chances of getting more increases in the patient who use to take long use of antibiotics mainly fluoroquinolones and also protein pump inhibitors and histamine two receptor antagonists.

And obviously if the immune system I weakened or having much age, or having a history of this infection before.

Long time stay in the hospital is also very harmful and one of the major risk factors.

These are some things that increase the chance of getting this infection.

This causes fever, pain in the abdomen, and foul-smelling diarrhea more than 10 times a day, dehydration, rapid heartbeat, etc.

It is diagnosed with a culture test.

2)

Treatment for this is for both mild cases and severe cases.

The mild case is considered when the leucocytosis is under 15000 mm3 and when this above the 15000mm3 then it is a severe case.

If a patient is taking antibiotics should be stopped and antidiarrheals should be ignored.

For mild cases, the first line of treatment is the use of oral vancomycin or oral fidaxomicin, and in the second line of treatment is oral use of metronidazole.

For severe cases, the first line of treatment is oral vancomycin and the second line is fidaxomicin.

And in more severe cases with vancomycin oral iv of metronidazole is also given.

3)

The stool of such patients has an odor of sickeningly sweet smell this is a very strong smell which is sweet and some also say that resembles horse manure.

Good wishes do rate thank you.