A lecture kept resonating in Joy Immak's head as she talked with her grandmother. A few days before Christmas, Immak's grandmother called to say her grandfather might be suffering from colitis once again. But Immak's gut was telling her that it was more serious.
She suspected a nasty infection she had just learned about in professor Helen Wing's Biology 464 (Bacterial Pathogenesis) class. The class focuses on how bacteria cause disease and how the body is built to defend pathogens. It also examines the nasty bugs currently in the headlines, and Clostridium difficile (C. difficile) was one of them.
Immak, a microbiology major, is close to her grandparents, who live in New Boston, a small town in east Texas. Their primary access to health care is a small clinic run by a registered nurse. With Immak's prompting, her grandmother looked up C. difficile and realized its symptoms -- fever, lethargy, severe abdominal pain, and frequent diarrhea -- were an exact match to the ailing grandfather's. She wrote the name of the bacterium down and showed it to the clinic's nurse, asking if it could be the culprit.
Immak's grandmother said the nurse's eyes opened wide and her grandfather was immediately taken to the nearest hospital. He was given an antibiotic that specifically targets the infection. He was in the hospital for nearly a week.
Although not common, C. difficile can lead to sepsis or a perforation in the intestines. The bacterium only grows in environments without oxygen, such as the lower intestine, where it germinates and can divide very rapidly if the "good" bacteria has been eliminated by using antibiotics, Wing said. "Most people are thought to carry C. difficile, but it only causes problems in individuals who already are weakened by a bacterial infection who have been taking antibiotics," said Wing. "Some antibiotics wipe out the problem bacteria but also wipe out the other bacteria that help to protect our bodies. What we end up with is Clostridium difficile in the right environment for growth with no bacterial competitors. Under these conditions it takes over and produces some really nasty toxins that damage our intestines."
Immak deflects credit for saving her grandfather's life to her grandmother and Wing, saying she was just the person in the middle. But Wing sees it differently. "Joy is a very smart young woman, and it is neat to see how her education is already being put to use," said Wing. "As an educator, you try and make a difference, and this is what you hope happens."