AAD - Antibiotic Associated Diarrhea

If you think antibiotics are all cure, think again. It can cause serious diarrhea too.

THE most serious cause of antibiotic-associated diarrhea (AAD) is Clostridium difficile; rod-shaped bacteria that compete with gut bacteria, or what remain of them, after recently wiped out by broad-spectrum antibiotics. These antibiotics include clindamycin, a drug for respiratory tract infections and skin and soft tissues infection as well.

A few people have Difficile residing normally in their gut. Others got it as patients in a health facility (e.g. hospital, nursing home). But as its population explodes, it results in the overproduction of toxins. They overrun the gut, and cause a painful diarrhea that can become severe.

The specie is nosocomial, known to cause diarrhea in hospitals worldwide. It developed clindamycin-resistant strains detected in outbreaks in New York, Arizona, Florida and Massachusetts from 1989 to 1992. Fluroquinolone-resistant strains appeared in North America in 2005.

AAD can lead to pseudomembranous colitis, a severe inflammation of the colon (large intestine) where the colon lining bleeds. Symptoms include abdominal cramps, bloody stools, fever, urge to defecate, and watery diarrhea (usually five to 10 times a day).

The three most common antibiotics associated with this disease in children are... [READ MORE]

This article appears in SunStar Cebu newspaper on 23 May 2012.

Comments

Deadly X-Gene Mutants

A RECENT study on macrophages (i.e. defensive cells in our body that engulf threatening substances inside our body) introduced me to a lethal, genetic disease that targets the male population. This disease is called Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), named after the French neurologist Guillaume Benjamin Amand Duchenne, who described it in 1861. While it has an incidence of one in 3,500 newborn males, health experts consider this as the most common lethal disease of childhood around the world. Mutation in the male (X) chromosome [dystrophin gene, locus Xp21] causes a rapid degeneration of the muscles, leading into an eventual loss of walking ability and then death. While females do not exhibit symptoms, they can be carriers of these defective genes, especially if the father had this condition or the mother is also a carrier. Symptoms usually appear before age five; at times visible in early infancy. These symptoms involve... ( Read more .) This article appears in Sun-Star Ce...

Joy, Temperance and Repose

“I RECKON being ill as one of the great pleasures of life, provided one is not too ill and is not obliged to work till one is better,” wrote Samuel Butler in The Way of All Flesh (1903). The term “antioxidant” was originally used in the 18th century to refer to a chemical that prevents the consumption of oxygen in laboratory experiments. However, in the late 19th and early 20th century, extensive study exploded... ( Read more ) This article appeared in SunStar Cebu newspaper on 02 June 2010.

Breakthroughs Today

Search This Blog