Most antibiotics are double-edged swords. Besides killing the pathogen they are prescribed for, they also decimate beneficial bacteria and change the composition of the gut microbiome. As a result, patients become more prone to reinfection, and drug-resistant strains are more likely to emerge. The answer to this problem might be narrow-spectrum antibiotics that kill only one...
Tag: <span>C. diff</span>
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Investigating the relationship between inflammatory bowel disease and C. diff
The gut-infecting bacterium, Clostridioides difficile, commonly known as C. diff, sickens half a million people and causes up to 30,000 deaths in the United States each year. Often, C. difficile infection occurs after antibiotic treatment, which inadvertently kills members of the gut microbiota—the community of microbes living in our intestines—that normally bar C. difficile from invading the gut. However,...