The objectives for the surveillance of CDIs are: - to estimate the incidence of CDIs in European acute care hospitals - to assess the burden of CDIs (including recurrent CDI cases) in European acute care hospitals - to provide participating hospitals with a standardised tool to measure and compare their own incidence rates with those observed in other participating hospitals - to assess adverse outcomes of CDIs including death - to describe the epidemiology of C. difficile at the local, national and European level, in terms of factors such as antibiotic susceptibility, PCR ribotype, presence of Clostridium difficile toxin A (TcdA), Clostridium difficile toxin B (TcdB) and binary toxin, morbidity and mortality of infection, and the detection of new/emerging types.

Abstract: Limited therapy options due to antibiotic resistance underscore the need for optimization of current diagnostics. In some bacterial species, antimicrobial resistance can be unambiguously predicted based on their genome sequence. In this study, we sequenced the genomes and transcriptomes of 414 drug-resistant clinical Pseudomonas aeruginosa isolates. By training machine learning classifiers on information about the presence or absence of genes, their sequence variation, and expression profiles, we generated predictive models and identified biomarkers of resistance to four commonly administered antimicrobial drugs. Using these data types alone or in combination resulted in high (0.8-0.9) or very high (> 0.9) sensitivity and predictive values. For all drugs except for ciprofloxacin, gene expression information improved diagnostic performance. Our results pave the way for the development of a molecular resistance profiling tool that reliably predicts antimicrobial susceptibility based on genomic and transcriptomic markers. The implementation of a molecular susceptibility test system in routine microbiology diagnostics holds promise to provide earlier and more detailed information on antibiotic resistance profiles of bacterial pathogens and thus could change how physicians treat bacterial infections

The objectives for the surveillance of CDIs are: - to estimate the incidence of CDIs in European acute care hospitals - to assess the burden of CDIs (including recurrent CDI cases) in European acute care hospitals - to provide participating hospitals with a standardised tool to measure and compare their own incidence rates with those observed in other participating hospitals - to assess adverse outcomes of CDIs including death- to describe the epidemiology of C. difficile at the local, national and European level, in terms of factors such as antibiotic susceptibility, PCR ribotype, presence of Clostridium difficile toxin A (TcdA), Clostridium difficile toxin B (TcdB) and binary toxin, morbidity and mortality of infection, and the detection of new/emerging types.