Clostridium difficile infection: the next big thing!
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Clostridium difficile causes infectious diarrhoea in humans and animals. It has been found in pigs, horses, and cattle, suggesting a potential reservoir for human infection, and in 20-40% of meat products in Canada and the USA, suggesting the possibility of food-borne transmission. It is likely that excessive antimicrobial exposure is driving the establishment of C. difficile in animals, in a manner analogous to human infection, rather than the organism just being normal flora of the animal gastrointestinal tract. Outside Australia, PCR ribotype 078 is the most common ribotype of C. difficile found in pigs (83% in one study in the USA) and cattle (up to 100%) and this ribotype is now the third most common ribotype of C. difficile found in humans in Europe. Human and pig strains of C. difficile are genetically identical in Europe confirming that a zoonosis exists. Rates of community-acquired C. difficile infection (CDI) are increasing world-wide, and a new community strain of unidentified origin has recently emerged in Australia. Environmental contamination may also play a role. C. difficile spores survive in treated piggery effluent, the by-products of which are used to irrigate crops and pasture and manufacture compost. There is abundant evidence that food products intended for human consumption contain toxigenic strains of C. difficile but food-borne transmission remains unproven. Thus there are four problems that require resolution: a human health issue, an animal health issue and the factors common to both these problems, environmental contamination and antimicrobial misuse.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.021 | 0.016 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".