Peggy Lillis was a healthy single mom raising two boys and working extra jobs on the weekend. All that ended on April 21, 2010, when an ICU doctor told her son Liam that his mom, who had been healthy just a week earlier, was dead from a Clostridioides difficile infection (CDI). CDI is a colon…

C. difficile (C. diff) is a bacterial infection that affects nearly half a million Americans each year. Paradoxically, treatment for the disease often uses strong antibiotics—yet antibiotic use is a major risk factor for contracting the disease. Despite issuing warnings three years ago, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently approved the first-ever standardized…

Clostridioides difficile, or C. difficile, a bacterial species that’s well known for causing serious diarrheal infections, may also drive colorectal cancer, research in mice has found. The findings appear in the journal Cancer Discovery, and may expose another troublesome role for this microbe, which causes approximately 500,000 infections a year in the United States—many of which prove…