C. difficile in the news

Tomorrow's Washington Post has an article on C. difficile, which unfortunately depicts the organism as a purely nosocomial pathogen. I recently blogged about contamination of the food supply with the organism and just last week cared for a patient with C. diff who had no exposure to hospitals or healthcare settings and had not taken antibiotics in the last year. I suspect we'll continue to see an increase of community-acquired cases. We still need to work on prevention in the hospital, but as for MRSA, VRE and many other bugs, hand hygiene should do the trick.