Clostridium difficile: changing epidemiology and new treatment options
Bibliographic record
Abstract
PURPOSE OF REVIEW: The review summarizes changes in the epidemiology and treatment of Clostridium difficile-associated disease. RECENT FINDINGS: Recent outbreaks of Clostridrium difficile-associated diarrhoea with increased severity, high relapse rate and significant mortality, have been related to the emergence of a new, hypervirulent C. difficile strain in north America, Japan and Europe. Definitions have been proposed by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control to identify severe cases of Clostridrium difficile-associated diarrhoea and to differentiate community-acquired cases from nosocomial-acquired cases. The emerging strain is referred to as North American pulsed-field type 1 and polymerase chain reaction ribotype 027. The emerging strain has also been detected in calf diarrhoea and ground meat samples in Canada. Attempts to prevent outbreaks caused by type 027 should focus on controlling the overall use of antibiotics, and high-risk antibiotics such as cephalosporins, clindamycin and fluoroquinolones. Several new antibiotic and non-antibiotic alternatives have become available; there is currently no place for probiotic treatments. Patients who suffer multiple relapses of C. difficile-associated diarrhoea present a major therapeutic challenge. SUMMARY: The early recognition of Clostridrium difficile-associated diarrhoea caused by NAP1/027 is necessary to start rapid treatment, to prevent complications, and to prevent further spread of the bacterium.
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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.003 |
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".