8809451.qxd - Septi-Chek .qxd

AND EXPLANATION Blood culture is one of the most important and critical procedures performed in the microbiology laboratory. Since blood is normally sterile, the isolation and identification of an organism has great diagnostic significance. Blood cultures are of great importance in diagnosing such conditions as endocarditis, typhoid fever, pneumonia and other diseases characterized by bacteremia. The use of a biphasic blood culture system has been shown to improve the sensitivity of blood culture over traditional broth media.1-3 When affixed to BBLTM SEPTI-CHEKTM Blood Culture Bottles after their inoculation with blood, the agar surfaces on the slide allow the subculture of aerobic, facultative and capnophilic microorganisms present in the specimen after the bottle with the slide attached is tilted and further incubated. The presence of resins in blood culture media has been shown to significantly increase the recovery of clinical pathogens from specimens.4,5 This increase in recovery is more pronounced in specimens in which antimicrobials are present, but there have also been significant increases in recovery from specimens which do not contain antimicrobials. The BBLTM SEPTI-CHEKTM TSB with Resins Culture Bottle, when used together with the BBLTM SEPTI-CHEKTM Slide, combines both features, and has been shown to be applicable for bacterial isolation in the presence and/or absence of a wide variety of antimicrobials (see “Performance Characteristics”). The presence of both nonselective and selective differential agar media on the slide allows a pre-differentiation of the microorganisms present in the liquid medium of the blood culture bottle.