Ultra-resistant strains of Clostridium Difficile, a bacteria that circulates in hospitals, are favored by the use of fluoroquinolones, a class of antibiotics.
Infections with Clostridium Difficult (CD) resistant, which circulate in hospitals, are not due to a lack of hygiene. Or at least not in the majority of cases. This is the conclusion of work from the University of Oxford (United Kingdom), published in the journal The Lancet. According to British researchers, it is rather the abusive prescription of fluoroquinolones, a range of antibiotics in which ciprofloxacin can be found, which is the cause. Their use would promote the appearance of resistant strains, which no antibiotic can eliminate.
More precisely, they believe that the reduction in the use of these antibiotics, effective in British hospitals, has more contributed to the decrease in the number of epidemics in CD resistant than hygiene measures. Their occurrence is said to have fallen by 80% since the implementation of the restriction measures. In the county of Oxfordshire, 67% of bacteria CD found in September 2006 were resistant to antibiotics, compared to only 3% in 2013.
A serious nosocomial infection
In most cases, it even becomes difficult to find resistant forms of CD. On the other hand, the study also reveals that, despite the strengthening of hygiene measures, the hospital services are unable to reduce the number of infections due to CD “Normal”.
The researchers also recall that the number of transmissions from one person to another has not changed, despite the hygiene measures imposed on nursing staff and the deep cleaning of hospital departments.
These nosocomial infections cause diarrhea, fever and pain, sometimes severe, which can lead to death. According to a study carried out in 2015 at the Poitiers University Hospital, they would be fatal in more than 20% of cases in people under 75 years of age, and in more than half of cases in the elderly (over 75 years). If they are so dangerous, it is because they affect people who are weakened (by age, or by disease), but also because of the resistant nature of certain strains which, by definition, do not respond to antibiotics.
In Europe, these infections affect 124,000 people per year, for a mortality of 3%. This represents approximately 3,700 deaths. This is much less than in the United States, where prescriptions for fluoroquinolones have not been restricted; each year, about 30,000 people die from an infection with CD.
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