Frequency of susceptibility testing for patients with persistent methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus bacteremia.

Currently, no standards exist for determining the optimal frequency of repeat antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST) when an organism is recurrently isolated from the same specimen source. Although testing every 2 to 5 days is thought sufficient, we present three cases of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) bacteremia where current laboratory protocol for repeating AST every 5 days was inadequate to identify resistant organisms.