Clostridium difficile

 For my blog post this week, our task is to analyze a health or science article from an online mainstream newspaper.  In our class on Thursday we discussed how health and science articles influence decisions we make and what types of ploys the authors use to makes the reader believe what they are saying about the subject is credible.

            I decided for this assignment that I would choose The New York Times as my online mainstream newspaper.  For my article I chose one entitled, “Test Drug Does Well Against Hospital Infection”, written by Andrew Pollack.  This article was about a new drug developed to help treat an intestinal superbug that spreads through hospitals and makes patients very ill and sometimes can even lead to death.  This new antibiotic helps treat a bacterium, Clostridium difficile, which can cause severe diarrhea and even in some cases removal of the colon.  Thousands of Americans are killed every year by this bacterium, but more violent strains have been found and doctors fear the bacterium will continue to spread and kill more people. 

            In the clinical trial of this new drug, ninety percent of the patients were successful cleared of the infection, but the other ten had relapses of the infection and required more medical attention.  There were two drugs used in this clinical trial, Vancocin, an approved drug, and an unnamed drug produced by Optimer Pharmaceuticals that is not approved yet, but approval would be based on the clinical trial.  The clinical trial seemed to favor the Optimer drug, having more success rates in curing the infection and a lesser rate of relapse.  The Vancocin is already on the market and had recorded sales of $182.3 million dollars in the first nine months of 2008.  The Optimer drug still has one more Phase of clinical trials to go through before applying for approval for sale by the Food and Drug Administration.  The final trial is set to be complete at the end of 2009. 

            The reporter of this article I felt did a good job at answering the questions, anyone or myself would have.  The only questions that were not answered that I thought needed to be were; what do the drugs that fight that bacterium actually do? Are there any side effects to the drug? Are these drugs for hospital use only or are they over the counter?  These were just some questions I had but overall I felt that the author wrote the article very well, just those couple of questions I believe should have been answered but even without them the article made sense.

            The article did contain some sources, a doctor, a representative from the Optimer Pharmaceutical company and the University of Massachusetts.  I felt like the sources used were credible.  The doctor seemed to have some insight into the bacterium and what it does and Optimer representative didn’t have much to say but her title, senior director for biology, made me believe that what she was saying was credible.  The University of Massachusetts seemed the least credible with no actual quotes from a representative, but the little bit about the subject the university presented seemed to be good information.  Overall the sources seemed credible but more probably could have been used.  The article did seem to lack expert opinions and ideas but the sources quoted appeared to be credible.

            This article had just enough information and sources to get the point across.  It was informative and taught me something new.  I hope that these drugs stop this bacterium and it will not become a hospital epidemic.

 

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