Exterminating Superbugs at the Source

Jan. 6, 2010— -- The hospital should be a place you go to get well, but that very same hospital can sometimes be the cause of your illness.

Richard McKenzie of Pittsburgh found out the hard way when he came down with a hospital-acquired infection known as C. difficile after a routine out-patient procedure.

"I came into the hospital for a colonoscopy and went back to regular life," McKenzie says.

But after a month of acute stomach pain and diarrhea and several trips to the doctor, McKenzie found out that he had a severe case of clostridium difficile, commonly known as C. difficile, which he battled for almost a year afterward.

Although the C. difficile bacteria naturally resides in the body, it can become overpopulated when antibiotics wipe out the good bacteria in the digestive tract or when a person becomes comes in contact with someone who's infected. The result is diarrhea, constipation, abdominal pain and, sometimes, flu-like symptoms, says infectious disease physician Dr. Lee Harrison of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

"It's a very, very hardy bug that can live in the environment for a long time," he notes, adding that the bacteria can be introduced to the environment through the feces of an infected patient and can survive as a spore on surfaces, bedrails, even on hospital staff.

The infection, along with several other prevalent hospital superbugs, afflicts 1.7 million hospital patients each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"Infections picked up in health care settings add billions of dollars to our nation's health bill and take as many as 100,000 lives [each year]," adds Dr. Rich Besser, senior health editor for ABC News.

As a result, "there's been a continuing interest in hospital infections for well over 20 years," says Dr. Richard Wenzel, infectious disease specialist and professor of internal medicine at the University of Virginia, and methods for fighting off these hospital bugs have become a hot topic for research.