Study Confirms Importance of Antimicrobial Stewardship for Controlling C. difficile Infections

​Appropriate antibiotic stewardship "is, and will likely remain, central to the control of C. difficile infections," concludes a study published online January 24, 2017, in Lancet Infectious Diseases. The researchers evaluated an antibiotic-resistant Clostridium difficile strain that caused infection outbreaks in England from 1998 to 2006. The outbreaks declined after 2006 when England adopted a combination of infection control measures and reduced use of certain antibiotics, such as cephalosporins and fluoroquinolones; the epidemic C. difficile strain had acquired resistance to these antibiotics. Using molecular typing, the researchers looked retrospectively at the C. difficile strains that occurred during the outbreak to evaluate which of the infection control measures might have contributed to the decline. The decline in *C.