The evolving epidemiology of <i>Clostridium difficile</i> infection in Canadian hospitals during a postepidemic period (2009–2015)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
<h3>Background:</h3> The clinical and molecular epidemiology of health care–associated <i>Clostridium difficile</i> infection in nonepidemic settings across Canada has evolved since the first report of the virulent North American pulsed-field gel electrophoresis type 1 (NAP1) strain more than 15 years ago. The objective of this national, multicentre study was to describe the evolving epidemiology and molecular characteristics of health care–associated <i>C. difficile</i> infection in Canada during a post-NAP1-epidemic period, particularly patient outcomes associated with the NAP1 strain. <h3>Methods:</h3> Adult inpatients with <i>C. difficile</i> infection were prospectively identified, using a standard definition, between 2009 and 2015 through the Canadian Nosocomial Infection Surveillance Program (CNISP), a network of 64 acute care hospitals. Patient demographic characteristics, severity of infection and outcomes were reviewed. Molecular testing was performed on isolates, and strain types were analyzed against outcomes and epidemiologic trends. <h3>Results:</h3> Over a 7-year period, 20 623 adult patients admitted to hospital with health care–associated <i>C. difficile</i> infection were reported to CNISP, and microbiological data were available for 2690 patients. From 2009 to 2015, the national rate of health care–associated <i>C. difficile</i> infection decreased from 5.9 to 4.3 per 10 000 patient-days. NAP1 remained the dominant strain type, but infection with this strain has significantly decreased over time, followed by an increasing trend of infection with NAP4 and NAP11 strains. The NAP1 strain was significantly associated with a higher rate of death attributable to <i>C. difficile</i> infection compared with non-NAP1 strains (odds ratio 1.91, 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.29–2.82). Isolates were universally susceptible to metronidazole; one was nonsusceptible to vancomycin. The proportion of NAP1 strains within individual centres predicted their rates of health care–associated <i>C. difficile</i> infection; for every 10% increase in the proportion of NAP1 strains, the rate of health care–associated <i>C. difficile</i> infection increased by 3.3% (95% CI 1.7%–4.9%). <h3>Interpretation:</h3> Rates of health care–associated <i>C. difficile</i> infection have decreased across Canada. In nonepidemic settings, NAP4 has emerged as a common strain type, but NAP1, although decreasing, continues to be the predominant circulating strain and remains significantly associated with higher attributable mortality.
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 distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.030 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".