In this prospective cohort study of patients admitted to hospitals in Quebec and Ontario, 2.8% of patients had Clostridium difficile infection and 3.0% had asymptomatic C. difficile colonization during hospitalization. Most patients with C. difficile infection had the NAP1 strain.

A newly discovered ehrlichia species closely related to E. muris was identified as a cause of illness in three people in Wisconsin and one in Minnesota. The syndrome is described, and the likely vector identified.

In this study of 34,989 births, a PCR-based detection method was found to have reasonable sensitivity and specificity for identifying congenital CMV from either liquid or dried saliva. This advance has implications for a variety of potential detection strategies.

An outbreak of tuberculosis occurred over a 3-year period in a medium-size community in British Columbia, Canada. The results of mycobacterial interspersed repetitive unit–variable-number tandem-repeat (MIRU-VNTR) genotyping suggested the outbreak was clonal. Traditional contact tracing did not identify a source. We used whole-genome sequencing and social-network analysis in an effort to describe the outbreak dynamics at a higher resolution.

In this study involving 3.7 million blood donors, nucleic acid testing identified 9 donors with HBV infection who were not identified by routine serologic testing. The single triplex assay also identified 2 donors with HIV and 15 with HCV.

Samples from patients with suspected TB were assayed for TB and drug resistance with several different techniques. An automated molecular test showed a sensitivity of 98% in smear-positive, culture-positive samples and a sensitivity of 72–90% in smear-negative, culture-positive samples, and it identified rifampin resistance >97% of the time.