The increasing prevalence of penicillin-resistant Streptococuus pneumoniae urges for fast and accurate susceptibility testing methods. This study evaluated the comparability of three commonly used techniques; disk diffusion, E-test and agar dilution, to detect penicillin susceptibility in clinical isolates of S. pneumoniae. Fifty pneumococcal isolates, obtained from patients at the University o...

The increasing prevalence of penicillin-resistant Streptococuus pneumoniae urges for fast and accurate susceptibility testing methods. This study evaluated the comparability of three commonly used techniques; disk diffusion, E-test and agar dilution, to detect penicillin susceptibility in clinical isolates of S. pneumoniae. Fifty pneumococcal isolates, obtained from patients at the University o...

PURPOSE A significant barrier to efficient antibiotic management of infection is that the standard diagnostic methodologies do not provide results at the point of care. The delays between sample collection and bacterial culture and antibiotic susceptibility reporting have led to empirical use of antibiotics, contributing to the emergence of drug resistant pathogens. As a key step toward the dev...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE A simplified antifungal disk diffusion test using Mueller-Hinton agar containing 2% glucose and methylene blue 5 microg/mL (GM-MH, Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute [CLSI] M44-A) has proved to correlate well with the standard reference test. A new azole, voriconazole, has recently been approved for clinical therapy in Taiwan. This study investigated the reliabil...

The use of analogies to explain difficult subjects has always been reckoned as an expedient of great utility. Analogical reasoning from Y to X can lead to correct conclusions, but not all implications that can be correctly drawn from Y can be applied to X. In a learning context, the use of analogies without the corresponding warning about differences between the subjects will produce invalid kn...

The purpose of this study was to determine whether the BACTEC NR-16A and NR-17A media were more effective than the BACTEC NR-6A and NR-7A media in recovering organisms from the blood of patients undergoing antimicrobial therapy. A total of 986 sets of four blood culture bottles were compared, giving 141, 174, 93, and 104 isolates with BACTEC NR-6A, NR-16A, NR-7A, and NR-17A, respectively. BACTE...

The Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute and the European Committee on Antimicrobial Susceptibility Testing can be considered the major international contributors to antimicrobial susceptibility testing. In this review, the author considers the differences between the respective organisations, examines the terminology used in antimicrobial susceptibility testing and argues for an urgent ...

We evaluated three commercial colistin susceptibility testing methods using 213 bloodstream Acinetobacter isolates identified by gene sequencing. Compared to the agar dilution reference method, excellent categorical agreements (both 99.1%) were observed using Vitek 2 and Etest, compared to 87.3% (95.7% for Acinetobacter baumannii and 80.7% for non-baumannii Acinetobacter isolates) using MicroScan.

The 2-U penicillin and microgram oxacillin discs proposed for screening meningococci for susceptibility to penicillin were evaluated by using MICs measured by the E test. The discs yielded unacceptably high frequencies of misclassification of susceptibility category and should be abandoned in favor of MIC estimations. An agreed breakpoint for reduced penicillin susceptibility in meningococci is...