Infection News

This month’s cover story highlights the growing burden of hepatocellular carcinoma, the most common type of primary liver cancer, in the United States. Despite being a cancer that does not typically receive much attention, HCC is projected to become the third leading cause of cancer-related death in the United States by 2040 if current trends continue. Its increasing mortality is related to a growing number of cases in the setting of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, the liver manifestation of the metabolic syndrome, and a high proportion of HCC cases being detected at a late stage. While patients detected at an early stage are amenable to curative therapies such as liver transplantation and have a median survival exceeding 5 years, those diagnosed at a late stage traditionally have had limited therapeutic options and a median survival of only 1 year.

Liver cancer — the fastest-growing cause of cancer death in the U.S. — has been notoriously difficult to treat.

The CDC said an outbreak of more than 100 of cases of Salmonella in 14 states has been linked to seafood distributed to restaurants and grocery stores in Colorado.

Using a new highly sensitive assay, researchers demonstrated that the amount of toxin in stool correlates with the severity of Clostridioides difficile infection, with higher concentrations associated with severe disease at diagnosis.

Patients with COVID-19 infection and gastrointestinal symptoms fared as well as their controls but often battled nausea afterward, according to a presenter at UEG Week Virtual.

An investigational therapy that uses the gut microbiome was safe and effective in treating recurrent Clostridioides difficile infection, according to data from five abstracts presented at IDWeek.

Researchers discovered a group of bacterial species and strains that may be used as an alternative to fecal microbiota transplantation to restore a patient’s gut microbiome, according to a study in Nature Microbiology.

CDC researchers identified 28 food items that caused disease outbreaks for the first time between 2007 and 2016 in the United States.

Fecal microbiota transplantation is not yet FDA approved for treating recurrent Clostridioides difficile despite several studies showing it to be efficacious and safe.

The first time I heard about “stool transplant” was in the late 1990s when I was attending a regional winter meeting of gastroenterologists in Brainerd, Minnesota (ironically, the site of an unexplained but well-documented outbreak of chronic diarrhea in the 80s).