Clostridium difficile

is UK superbug du jour. (What happens when it becomes more resistant, virulent and nasty, does it become a superduperbug?) The British media thrive on health scares and of course bacteria are triffic because they are invisible, sinister, little understood, easily labelled, thrive around dirt and therefore belong in the same tabloid story silo as foreigners.

MRSA is so last year and is on the decline (for now) so C. difficile made its tabloid debut (rather alarming graph showing UK deaths up to 2005 attributed to C. difficile here). It is very infectious, hard to eradicate and despite what you might read currently has a mortality rate of 3%. Once it sets up shop in the large intestine, it can be hard to shift, upsetting the normal intestinal bacterial communities which keep things running smoothly down there. Some people with prolonged intractible infections have resorted to extreme measures to reset their gut microbial populations, and in a majority of cases it seems to have worked. Absolutely not dinner table safe.

And if are interested in things small and infectious Tara Smith’s Aetiology is an excellent blog and should be bookmarked: top-class, lucid, well-linked science writing for the rest of us. (A couple of comedy howling-at-the-moon nutjob commentators infest the place too.)