Doctor Dogs by Maria Goodavage

Author:Maria Goodavage
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-09-30T16:00:00+00:00

And yet Angus is happy to find it. Ecstatic, actually.

As Teresa and I discuss the smelly superbug, I realize I’d just been petting a dog who sniffed possible C. diff in a hospital unit. Could he have rubbed against it? Probably not. Just in case, I fish out the bottle of Purell in my bag and squirt it onto my hands.

“Oh, sorry,” Teresa says, in the endearing way many Canadians say “sorry.” “Purell doesn’t really protect against C. diff.”

What?! Purell and other alcohol-based hand sanitizers boast that they kill 99.99 percent of common germs that cause illness. That’s a really large percentage. Like pretty much everything. When you see “99.99 percent,” you don’t think there’s going to be anything harmful in the remaining 0.01 percent. You don’t even think of that 0.01 percent. Maybe these sanitizers should say something like “Kills 99.99 percent of common germs that cause illness but NOT the superbug C. diff, which can make you really REALLY sick. Go wash your hands with soap and water—now!”

The journal Infection Control & Hospital Epidemiology confirms Teresa’s warning: “Alcohol is not effective against Clostridium difficile spores,” it states, and adds an example to drive home the point: “Residual spores are readily transferred by a handshake after use of ABHR.” (Alcohol-based hand rubs have their own acronym in certain circles.) The paper goes on to state that thorough hand washing is far more effective.

I excuse myself and wash my hands twice as long as usual. When I return, Teresa tells me, “Better safe than sorry. Believe me. You do NOT want C. diff.”

This sounds personal. Turns out it is. In 2013, Teresa had a leg wound that became septic, and the antibiotics she had to take depleted her beneficial bacteria. This left C. diff to colonize and proliferate.

She had it bad, with diarrhea four to five times an hour, necessitating diapers, much to her embarrassment. The infection also brought fever, pain, and chills. She spent five days in the hospital, and in the course of one week with C. diff lost twenty pounds.

“I almost died,” she says.

She finally got better—thanks, ironically, to antibiotics.

During her recovery her husband, Markus, ran across an article about a beagle in the Netherlands who was trained to sniff patients for C. diff. Teresa was a dog handler and trainer at the time, working with bomb- and drug-detection dogs in the private sector.

“Do you think you could train a dog to find C. diff in the environment?” he asked. Markus, a nurse working in Quality and Patient Safety for Vancouver Coastal Health, knew there were no fast, accurate ways to detect C. diff lurking in hospital settings.

“If it has a smell, I can train a dog to find it,” Teresa told him with conviction. Based on her bout with the bug, she was pretty sure that C. diff stinks in more ways than one.

She had recently acquired a pup named Angus and was planning to train him as a detection dog for a security job. He was in the right place at the right time.

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