Clostridium Difficile Infection - A Review of Current Treatment Strategies

Clostridium difficile is an anaerobic, gram-positive, spore forming rod-shaped bacillus, spread via the fecal-oral route. The organism was first identified by Hall and O’Toole on 1935 in the stools of newborns, and referred to as Bacillus Difficilis in view of the difficulty in isolation and study [1]. The organism was subsequently renamed Clostridium difficile. The first reported case of toxin-producing Clostridium as a cause of antibiotic associated colitis was in 1978 [2,3].