Andrea Betesh, MD: Better Managing C Difficile Infections

Recent research has indicated more community spread of clostridium difficile infections (CDI) is occurring as opposed to hospital spread.

This could be problematic for a number of reasons, particularly that it will be more difficult to curb this spread outside of the controlled hospital setting.

Despite the hope of new treatments, especially the live microbiota therapies currently in development, it will be more difficult to cut down rates of CDI if the spread is occurring within the community.

In an interview with HCPLive®, Andrea Betesh, MD, Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Division of Gastroenterology and Hepatology at Weill Cornell Medical Center, explained how difficult it is stop community spread of C difficile infections.

Betesh recently took part in HCPLive’s State of the Science event chaired by Carl V. Crawford, MD, Weill Cornell Medicine, called Institutional Perspectives in Infectious Diseases: Management of C. Difficile on November 9th.

Betesh presented on understanding C difficile infections, what the burden is of these infections, and who is mostly at risk of severe outcomes.

She said there about 450,000 new cases of C difficile infections per year and 83,000 cases of recurrence. In addition, about 80 patients die a day in the US from CDI.