C diff
dr. dolittle | October 8, 2013 Image of C. difficile from BBC News.
You may recall a prior post about a dog that could smell when patients were infected with Clostridium difficile. C. difficile causes about 14,000 deaths per year in the United States. Recent breakthroughs in understanding gut microbes have led to the successful treatment of C. difficile in patients. Fecal transplants, the transfer of feces from a healthy person, has been life-saving for some patients for whom medical treatments are not effective or for recurrent infections. Listen to Billie's story here. To date, feces have been transferred by enemas,…
dr. dolittle | December 17, 2012Researchers have actually trained a beagle named Cliff to detect the intestinal bacteria Clostridium difficile on patients and in stool samples that were collected from infected patients in the Netherlands. This infection is common in hospitals and long-term treatment facilities. Infection with the contagious C. diff results in diarrhea that has been responsible for the deaths of up to 14,000 Americans each year. Having a dog sniff out the infection may seem absurd until you consider it can take up to a week to detect the infection using traditional laboratory techniques. Being able to detect…