When good bacteria are killed, C. difficile strikes

Peggy Lillis wasn’t expecting trouble when her dentist prescribed antibiotics after she had a root canal in 2010. It was a standard, just-in-case treatment to prevent infections after the procedure.

She also wasn’t worried when she developed diarrhea soon afterward. The kindergarten teacher assumed she’d caught a bug from one of her young students.

But within just a few days, the previously healthy 56-year-old was dead – a victim of Clostridioides difficile or C. diff. These bacteria are common but can grow out of control when antibiotics or other factors deplete the healthy microbes living in the intestines – the microbiome.

Patients can suffer severe diarrhea, a distortion of the colon known as megacolon, and sepsis as the infection spreads to the bloodstream. It’s painful and can be hard to treat.

About one out of every six patients who get C. diff will get it again in the following two months, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says. Such infections kill 1 out of 11 people over the age of 65 who develop a C. diff infection in the hospital.

It’s a One Health problem, as the bacteria spread globally.

Antibiotics are not always effective in treating C. diff. because these bacteria thrive when the natural population of microbes is killed off. Instead, many doctors are turning to treatments that can replace the healthy microbiome. These can include fecal microbiota transplants (FMTs), also known as poop transplants, or therapies that more directly replace the “good” microbes.

Peggy Lillis’ sons, Christian and Liam, didn’t want her death to have been in vain, so they founded the Peggy Lillis Foundation to advocate for awareness of C. diff, public policy to fight it, and for better treatments.

Christian Lillis says he will never get over losing his mother to C. diff.  “It remains the worst thing that has ever happened to me,” he tells One World, One Health host Maggie Fox. In this episode, Lillis tells us about this dangerous repercussion of the misuse and overuse of antibiotics, the need for new treatments, and what survivors and family members can do to take action against C. diff.