Treating C. difficile: The Downside to Current Approaches

Stuart Johnson, MD, infectious disease clinician in the Medicine/ID department at Loyola University Medical Center, discusses the disadvantages to some of the current approaches used to treat C. difficile.

Interview Transcript (modified slightly for readability):

“Traditionally, Clostridium difficile infection has been treated with antibiotics that are active against the bacteria; it’s a big of an irony that the disease is typically precipitated by antibiotic treatment meant for, say, urinary tract infection, pneumonia, et. cetera. But the treatment certainly involves classically, antibiotics directed against the organism.

The downside of this, of course, would be that the antibiotics are what got the patient into the situation they’re in, and the treatment, although usually effective for controlling the infection, also have a collateral damage to the flora, the gut that perpetuates this recurrence, if you will.”