A bacterial gut infection that clinicians have long treated as a disease of hospitalized older adults rose sharply in the youngest adult age group over the past decade, even as it fell substantially everywhere else.
A new analysis of roughly 38 million U.S. emergency department visits and nearly 150,000 cases found that Clostridioides difficile infection dropped 30 percent overall between 2014 and 2024, from 2.94 to 2.07 cases per 1,000 emergency visits. Among people aged 18 to 24, incidence climbed 59 percent over the same period.
