How to: Surveillance of Clostridium difficile infections

Abstract

Incidence rates of CDI, obtained from a standardized CDI surveillance system, can be used as an important quality indicator of healthcare at hospital as well as country level.

Characteristics of Clostridium difficile isolates and the burden of hospital-acquired Clostridium difficile infection in a tertiary teaching hospital in Chongqing, Southwest China

“…This may be one of the causes for the lack of epidemiological data in this country. To obtain surveillance data for CDI, a network of reference or central laboratories such as that found in Europe is needed [43]. Second, this study failed to track clinical treatments of HA-CDI, but most patients recovered from diarrhea after the discontinuation of antibiotic therapy.…”

Association of <i>Clostridium difficile</i> with Antibiotic Associated Diarrhea among Hospitalized Children in Diyala-Iraq

“…Clostridium difficile is an anaerobic, spore-forming, and toxin-producing bacillus that emerged as an important cause of antibiotic-associated diarrhea worldwide [1] [2] [3]. Cl.…”

A two-step approach for the investigation of a Clostridium difficile outbreak by molecular methods

“…Clostridium difficile is a leading pathogen of healthcareassociated infections with an increasing incidence monitored between 2005 and 2013 in Europe [1]. In order to characterize C. difficile isolates, a wide range of molecular methods that target different regions in the C. difficile genome were developed [2].…”

“…The comparison of different typing approaches revealed differences in discriminatory power, turnaround time and cost [2]. According to the results from a survey on the typing capacity for C. difficile in Europe, the most widely applied method for characterization of C. difficile isolates for surveillance purposes is PCR ribotyping (25 countries) followed by multi-locus variable-number tandemrepeats analysis (MLVA, 13 countries); whole genome sequencing (WGS) was available only in five countries in 2017 [1].…”

“…The capillary electrophoresis PCR ribotyping is recommended for characterization of C. difficile isolates for CDI surveillance purposes, and indeed is the currently favoured approach by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) [1]. This method is based on the variability in length and number of copies of intergenic spacer region (ISR) between genes encoding 16S and 23S ribosomal RNA.…”