And last year deaths from C-difficile went up in Wales, but fell sharply in England.
We're making real progress against MRSA but the war against another infection, C-difficile, must be intensified.
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At least 90 patients died at Maidstone Hospital between 2004 and 2006 in a C.difficile outbreak.
It is also developing fast tests for two other troublesome bugs, C. difficile and resistant enterococcus.
Numbers then explode, C. difficile dominates the gut and masses of toxins are produced.
There were 2, 053 C. difficile infections last year, compared with 2, 704 the year before.
The new bugs multiply rapidly and take over the lower intestine, driving C. difficile away.
When C. difficile bacteria overwhelm the gut, it can be fatal and difficult to treat with antibiotics.
He showed in 2002 that feeding hamsters nontoxic bacteria was 90% effective at holding off the bad C. difficile strains.
If they do this while not killing off the C. difficile, it can return with a vengeance.
She said rates of clostridium difficile there were now lower than they were at this time last year.
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In 2010, 33 people admitted for surgery or other ailments caught a superbug called Clostridium difficile, or C. diff.
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But rates for C. difficile, which mainly strikes the elderly, rose by 2%.
The gut infection Clostridium difficile can be defeated by a cocktail of rival good bacteria, experiments in mice show.
But ViroPharma, a small Pennsylvania company, is developing a nontoxic strain of Clostridium difficile to help treat hospital infections.
Breast feeding also resulted in a change in microbes, with formula-fed babies showing more Peptostreptococcaceae bacteria and Clostridium difficile.
The US Centers for Disease Control say C. difficile is linked to 14, 000 deaths in the US each year.
Prof Brendan Wren, from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, has been studying C. difficile for 25 years.
C. difficile bacteria live in many people's guts alongside hundreds of other species - all fighting for space and food.
By comparing the genetic code of batches of C. difficile, researchers can work out how related different batches of C. difficile are.
Nicola Sturgeon was able to report that the incidence of the two most prominent infections, MRSA and C.difficile, were both coming down.
However, a strong course of antibiotics can kill off C. difficile's competition.
Two closely-related strains of Clostridium difficile became antibiotic resistant and were able to rapidly spread to hospitals around the world, a study says.
Doctors prescribed a series of increasingly potent antibiotics to try to knock out the new bad bug, Clostridium difficile (C. diff), but nothing worked.
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She left her job days before a report into a clostridium difficile (C. diff) outbreak at Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells NHS Trust was released.
They were caused by a once rare variant of C. difficile which has become the most common cause of the infection in North America.
She again refused to set up a public inquiry into the outbreak of C.difficile at the Vale of Leven hospital while the police investigation continues.
The number of deaths from two hospital infections, MRSA and Clostridium difficile, has fallen between 2010 and 2011, according to figures for England and Wales.
The trust said C.difficile affected less than one in every 1, 000 patients admitted to its hospitals and in almost every instance it was caused by antibiotic use.
Liz Morgan-Lewis, a spokeswoman for the HPA, said it was hard to know how prevalent the new strain of C.difficile was, because comprehensive data was not available.
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