Mayo Clinic researcher Sahil Khanna and his colleagues have found that children are contracting the disease at ever-higher rates, too. And most of them are being infected outside of hospitals. He presented the findings at the annual Digestive Disease Week medical conference ending today.  Although C. diff infections were first documented in the late 1970s, Khanna tells Shots, "there haven't been any studies of children in and outside the hospital." So he and fellow researchers examined data from Olmsted County, Minn., where they had access to detailed records for the entire community, going back decades.

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NPR Shots Blog by Ted Burnham

Tags: C. diff infections, Digestive Disease Week, Dr. Sahil Khanna, Infectious Diseases, Mayo Clinic Rochester, NPR Shots Blog, Pediatrics, Research