Investigation of Clostridioides (Clostridium) difficile in a community hospital in Southern Ontario, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: In response to Clostridioides (Clostridium) difficile infections (CDI), infection prevention and control practices in hospital settings tend to focus on symptomatic patients, potentially neglecting other sources of C. difficile. The purpose of the study was to identify epidemiological connections between C. difficile positive patients to explore the possibility of transmission occurring. This would allow an assessment of IPAC practices to ensure resources were being optimized and targeted to the most appropriate strategies to prevent transmission. Methods: C. difficile was isolated and characterized from 125 patient stool specimens. Isolates were subjected to toxin profiling and ribotyping. Patient locations in the hospital were mapped and epidemiological connections between patients with the same C. difficile ribotype were assessed. Results: A total of 47 distinct ribotypes were identified, with the most common being ribotype 027/NAP1. Of the 41 cases identified as hospital-associated, only four (9.8%) of the cases could be epidemiologically linked to another patient with known CDI. Conclusions: A small minority of hospital-associated infections were found to have an epidemiological link to another known case of CDI suggesting transmission from known cases is rare. This suggested that current IPAC practices were effective in preventing transmission from symptomatic patients, but other sources of C. difficile are potentially unrecognized.
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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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 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".