CALGARY - The solution to C. difficile, a nasty infection that is a growing problem in many hospitals throughout North America, may ultimately come from the body of a peaceful resident of South America -- the llama.

Clostridium difficile is a common cause of infectious diarrhea in nursing homes and hospitals and usually occurs in patients who have been taking regular antibiotics for an infection.

The antibiotics decrease the normal beneficial bacteria in the gut and allow C. difficile bacteria, which are resistant to most antibiotics, to grow uncontrollably.

"It's basically impossible to prevent it entirely and so what happens is this bug produces spores which are really hard to kill and then gets into the air ducts. It's impossible to completely bleach and sanitize that every day," said Dr. Kenneth Ng, an associate professor of biological sciences at the University of Calgary and principal investigator of the Alberta Ingenuity Centre for Carbohydrate Science.

"This disease affects something like five to 10 per cent of the people who are treated with antibiotics in a hospital so it could be like one to two per cent of people going into a hospital comes down with the disease," he added.

New research from the University of Calgary and the National Research Council in Ottawa suggests that simple antibodies from the llama can interfere with the disease-causing toxins from the infection.

"The current treatments are becoming less effective and C. difficile is developing resistance to conventional antibiotics. This research promises to provide a much-needed alternate treatment option that will overcome the failings of conventional antibiotics," said Dr. Glen Armstrong, head of the Department of Microbiology, Immunology, and Infectious Diseases in the faculty of medicine at the University of Calgary.

The research is part of a paper published Friday in the print issue of the Journal of Biological Chemistry.

Ng said the researchers are trying to develop a new treatment with a basic science approach in order to understand how the toxic proteins produced by the bacteria damage the cells in the intestine.

"The idea is once we understand that we can block that interaction and once we block it we have a new, very specific treatment against the bug," he said.

Ng estimates that C. difficile costs the North American health care system between $10 billion and $20 billion per year. He said at this point using llama antibodies shows a lot of promise and can interfere with the activity of the toxins.

"These antibodies you could say have a simpler structure than the structure of the antibodies that you produce when you get infected along with other mammals such as mice and rats and rabbits and things people use in labs," he said.

"These llamas and camels have a special simpler kind of antibody that has a lot of advantages for developing the antibodies into a potential drug treatments."

Ng said it's too early to say how soon the research could produce concrete results in the treatment of the disease.