There are wide discrepancies across hospitals in Europe as to the percentage of diarrheal samples being tested for C. diff, and more than 6 percent of hospitalized diarrheal patients were diagnosed incorrectly, according to a study presented at the 23rd European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases or EUCLID (Berlin; April 27-30). The first wave of results from the multicenter EUCLID study involved samples from 482 hospitals in 20 European countries. Just under 4,000 fecal samples were tested at the EUCLID national coordinating laboratory (NCL), where it was determined the average incidence rate of C. diff infection across Europe is 6.6 per 10,000 patient bed days, “substantially” higher than previously estimated. Alarmingly, 24.6 percent of samples positive for C. diff at the NCL had not been tested at the local hospital level, and 47 patients (2.3 percent) positive for C. diff at the NCL were tested but diagnosed incorrectly (false negative) at the local hospital. Only 10.6 percent of hospitals tested all diarrheal inpatient samples. There was a wide range across hospitals with respect to the percentage of samples tested for C. diff—97 percent at a Czech hospital to 0 percent in a Bulgarian hospital. Despite national guidelines to […]