The dogs were supposed to be experts at sniffing out C. diff. Then they smelled breakfast
A hospital trained dogs to try to detect the bacterium Clostridium difficile. But they weren't perfect — and they "found it hard to pass a toilet without drinking out of it."
It seemed like such a great idea. But at the end of the day, as they say, those dogs didn’t hunt. Or at least not well enough.
New research from Toronto throws into question the notion that canines could be used in hospitals to detect patients with a debilitating and highly contagious form of diarrhea caused by the bacterium Clostridium difficile, or C. diff.
Earlier infection control teams in the Netherlands and Vancouver, Canada, had to sniff out patients with C. difficile from those with other types of diarrhea, or to find the bacterium’s hard-to-eradicate spores in hospital rooms being cleaned after housing a C.
