On 9/23/2014 Nightowlz said: I have never heard of this. This sounds like some scary stuff. I'm a little confused. Are you saying you get C-Diff while in the hospital or from taking antibiotics? I never take antibiotics unless absolutely necessary. The doctor told me I had walking pneumonia at one time & I needed to take antibiotics & I asked if it would go away without them & he said yes it would just take longer so I refused them. He could not believe it. He said he has patients in his office every day wanting them for something they did not need them for & I actually need them & refused. So sorry to anyone that has been through this.
Yes, it's very scary stuff Nightowlz. You are already smart not to take antibiotics unless absolutely necessary, but if one person can learn this from reading these discussions, it will have been for the good.
You can get C. diff. from being in the hospital. A hospital-acquired infection is also referred to as a nosocomial infection. C. diff. can be transferred by unhygienic practices by hospital personnel (hand-washing in between patients) or an unhygienic hospital environment. The bacteria can live on unclean surfaces for a very long time. All it takes is hand-to-mouth contact.
A C. diff. infection can also occur as a result of taking antibiotics. Antibiotics work by killing the offending bacteria in the gut for any particular infection. However, at the same time, they can kill off good bacteria in the gut, thereby upsetting the balance of good:bad flora in the gut. When this balance is upset, bad bacteria can be allowed to proliferate. C. diff. is a bad bacteria normally present in small amounts in the gut, and normally causes no problem whatsoever because the good bacteria keep it in check, but it can proliferate if the good bacteria are not present to keep it in check. Once C. diff. is allowed to proliferate, they produce toxins that basically eat away at the intestinal wall.
[As an aside, broad-spectrum antibiotics kill off more good bacteria than narrow-spectrum antibiotics, so it's always best to have any bacterial infection cultured and identified so that a person can take the latter and not risk killing off more good bacteria. If a person absolutely has to take an antibiotic, they should ask their doc if it's broad or narrow spectrum and opt for narrow spectrum.]
Ironically, it takes a course of an antibiotic to "cure" a C. difficile infection. The standard protocol includes one of two antibiotics, either Flagyl (metronidazole) or Vancocin (vancomycin). There are other more natural methods which I'm not familiar with. There is also fecal transplant which, literally, places the stool of a healthy person into the gut of an infected person with the goal being to restore normal, healthy flora in the gut.
Finally, the more global problem affecting ALL of us vis-a-vis use of antibiotics is that widespread antibiotic use in the general population can cause bad bacteria to mutate and become resistant to the treatments used to eradicate them. So think about it...if too many people in our country (or world) use Flagyl or Vancocin, eventually, the C. diff. bacteria, for example, will mutate and become resistant to these drugs. These drugs are the first line of defense against C. diff. Once they become ineffective, due to resistant mutant bacteria, we are all in a lot of trouble.
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