Antibiotics andClostridium difficile

It is hard to remember a time in the past decades when Clostridium difficile was not a scourge in our hospitals. As a house officer in the early 1960s, I recall seeing only one patient with hospital-acquired colitis, which we called staphylococcal colitis. On the basis of what in retrospect was probably a false diagnosis, we treated the infection successfully with bacitracin, which fortuitously is active against C. difficile. Recognition of the current disease began in the early 1970s with a few isolated reports of a severe, and even lethal, colitis characterized by the formation of pseudomembranous plaques. Because of . . .