An automated blood culture system: the detection of anaerobic bacteria using a Malthus Microbiological Growth Analyser

The Malthus Microbiological Growth Analyser has proved to be sensitive in detecting conductivity changes due to anaerobic metabolism in a number of widely used blood culture media. Freshly prepared cooked meat media and Thiol medium yielded the greatest gross conductivity changes, and were more sensitive of anaerobic metabolism than other media. Failure of the instrument to detect anaerobic metabolism was a problem particularly associated with growth in the thioglycollate medium. False positive detections of growth were attributed to a number of factors including electrode instability (6.0%) and bacterial contamination (8.75%).