Food additive may have given deadly bacterium its chance

By Anthony King2018-01-04T15:31:00

Trehalose (mycose, tremalose) sugar molecule. Atoms are represented as spheres with conventional color coding: hydrogen (white), carbon (grey), oxygen (red)

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Trehalose sugar offers competitive advantage to virulent strains of gut bacterium C. difficile

A food additive spurred on the development of virulent strains of the bacterium Clostridium difficile, new research suggests. Between 2001 and 2006, epidemic strains of the bacterium began infecting patients in the US, Canada and Europe, causing life-threatening gut inflammation and diarrhoea. This rise in dangerous C. difficile infections coincided with more and more of the sugar trehalose being added to foods.