Meat + Poultry - February 2009 - 63

infection brings on diarrhea and can
lead to dangerous inflammations of
the colon - colonitis - if not caught
and checked early. Health authorities
say it probably causes thousands of
deaths, and perhaps tens of thousands
of deaths, in health- care facilities every year. (Canadian authorities blame C.
diff for roughly 2,000 deaths over 2003
and 2004 in a single province, Quebec.)
According to Limbago, as much as 80
percent of all recorded C. diff-caused
infections have occurred in a healthcare setting, with human-to-human
transmission the most likely distributing vector - but at the same time, she
adds, "there are other cases with no
health-care connection."
The usual treatment for pathogenic
infection, a regimen of antibiotic therapy, is nearly useless against C. difficile,
because antibiotics clear out resident microflora and leave behind, in the human
gut, a kind of microbiological desert,
which C. diff appears to be especially
well-equipped for exploiting. According to a study released last November
by the Association for Professionals in
Infection Control and Epidemiology, 13
out of every 1,000 hospital patients becomes infected by C. diff, a rate up to 20
times greater than had previously been
estimated. Just as worrying, a virulent

S i n c e 1907

new strain, NAP1, has emerged, and its
toxin is 20 times more potent than other
strains. Moreover, NAP1 has proven to
be resistant to fluoroquinolone antibiotics such as Cipro and Levaquin. It's
a proven killer: A pregnant mother of
twins spontaneously aborted and then

"You've got to be really
aggressive with it. As
the population ages,
we're going to have
to figure out a way to
effectively deal with it,
no question."
died from C. diff infection, according
to a 2005 CDC review. It is the virulent new strain, however, that has been
found on meat and in livestock.
"It's a very difficult pathogen to get
under control," says Dr. David Theno, the
recently retired director of technical services at Jack in the Box and one of the
industry's leaders in the battle against E.
coli O157:H7. "You've got to be really aggressive with it. As the population ages,
we're going to have to figure out a way to
effectively deal with it, no question."

According to the Mayo Clinic, "In
hospitals and nursing homes, C. difficile spreads mainly on the hands of
caregivers, but also on cart handles,
bedrails, bedside tables, toilets, sinks,
stethoscopes, thermometers - even telephones and remote controls."

A taste for sausage
So what's it doing in meat? That's what
CDC would like to know. In the effort
to come up with an answer, the federal agency called a meeting, in mid-December, of C. diff's leading researchers
and other interested microbiologists and
food scientists. The specific purpose of
the meeting, according to Dr. Limbago,
who attended, "was to discuss methods
of detection of Clostridium difficile in
foods," but the real driver behind the
gathering is the compelling, troubling
data gathered by Songer in Arizona,
Dr. Scott Weese at the Univ. of Guelph in Canada, and Dr. Roger Harvey, a
veterinary medical officer with USDA's
Agricultural Research Service facility in
College Station, Texas.
Glenn Songer's studies are, in some
ways, the most worrisome for the meat
industry. He found, for the first time, an
identical strain of C. diff in contaminated food and in hogs. Moreover, the professor of veterinary science also found

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Meat + Poultry - February 2009

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