Clostridium difficile: An important pathogen of food animals

Antimicrobial susceptibility of Clostridium difficile isolated from animals and humans in Brazil

“…Certain studies have reported high susceptibility of C. diffi cile strains to tylosin, which suggests that this antimicrobial could be used in pig feed to decrease or eliminate C. diffi cile in animal feces (POST & SONGER, 2004;SONGER & ANDERSON, 2006). In contrast, 14 strains (25.9%) in this study were resistant to tylosin; eight were isolated from piglets and three were isolated from dogs, suggesting that this antimicrobial would not be effective for CDI prevention, control or treatment in the species evaluated herein.…”

Increase in AdultClostridium difficile–related Hospitalizations and Case-Fatality Rate, United States, 2000–2005

“…Allocation of public health resources aimed at prevention of CDAD is necessary to mitigate this growing epidemic. Research into the best preventive strategies, such as limiting the use of antimicrobial agents in both human disease and the food supply (11), is a public health imperative. …”

Clostridium difficile in Food and Animals: A Comprehensive Review

“…difficile has been widely described in both healthy pigs and pigs with diarrhoea (Table 1). In neonatal piglets (<15 days old), C. difficile has been proposed as the most common cause of diarrhoea (Songer and Anderson 2006) with a mortality rate of up to 50 % in suckling piglets (Songer 2000). Previous studies reported spore or toxin detection ranging between 23 and 93 % in faeces of diarrhoeic piglets and between 1.4 and 96 % in piglets with normal faeces (Table 1).…”

“…However, in recent years C. difficile infection (CDI) is increasingly common in the community, in younger patients without a previous history of hospitalisation or antibiotic treatment (Gupta and Khanna 2014). Studies worldwide have reported the presence of the bacterium in animals and foods (Songer and Anderson 2006;Hoover and Rodriguez-Palacios 2013;Rodriguez-Palacios et al 2013) with a prevalence that varies according to the methodology used, the geographical area, the age and the animal species studied. While C. difficile is well known as enteric pathogen in some food producing, wild and companion animal species (Donaldson and Palmer 1999;Songer and Uzal 2005), there are several reports describing the presence of the bacterium in the intestinal contents of apparently healthy animals (Rodriguez et al 2012;Hawken et al 2013).…”