Half of US hospitals could do more to prevent serious infections

Too few hospitals in the United States are doing everything they can to protect patients from a potentially deadly intestinal infection, a new study finds. Researchers from the University of Michigan surveyed almost 400 hospitals nationwide to determine what measures they had taken to prevent Clostridium difficile infections, which kill nearly 30,000 Americans a year and cause illness in hundreds of thousands more. Hospital patients are at high risk for C. difficile infections and for suffering serious effects, especially if they have taken antibiotics, which disrupt the normal community of bacteria in their digestive systems. Symptoms include diarrhea, fever, nausea and loss of appetite.