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Previous Volume 341:1689-1691 November 25, 1999 Number 22 Next

	Since this article has no abstract, we have provided an extract of the first 100 words of the full text and any section headings.

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It is hard to remember a time in the past decades when Clostridium difficile was not a scourge in our hospitals. As a house officer in the early 1960s, I recall seeing only one patient with hospital-acquired colitis, which we called staphylococcal colitis. On the basis of what in retrospect was probably a false diagnosis, we treated the infection successfully with bacitracin, which fortuitously is active against C. difficile.

Recognition of the current disease began in the early 1970s with a few isolated reports of a severe, and even lethal, colitis characterized by the formation of pseudomembranous plaques. Because of . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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