C. diff is a ubiquitous hospital problem and is common in patients who are hospitalized, especially when they are given broad-spectrum antibiotics.
The study found that about a quarter of the people who had acquired C. diff were previously healthy.
The 12% who acquired C. diff but had not been to a hospital were less likely to have taken antibiotics but more likely to have taken proton-pump inhibitors for heartburn treatment, providing further evidence for a correlation between heartburn medication and C. diff acquisition.
The data that provided these results comes from phone interviews of almost 1,000 people infected with C. diff in 8 states from 2009 to 2011.
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