To the Editor: Patients who receive long-term hemodialysis are at great risk for infection (1,2), especially bacteremia, which may lead to devastating outcomes (3). Environmental bacteria are commonly recovered from dialysis fl uid, but their contribution to infection is less evident (4). We report a bacteremic episode caused by an unusual soil bacterium, Dyella ja-ponica. The patient was a 69-...

When the performance of the BACTEC MGIT 960 system was evaluated with the traditional proportion method (PM) on 321 clinical isolates of Mycobacterium tuberculosis from China, concordance values were 98.44% capreomycin, 98.75% kanamycin, 98.75% ofloxacin and 94.08% ethionamide. The turnaround time with BACTEC MGIT 960 system (7.5±1.8 days) was significantly shorter than with PM (28 days or 42 d...

Levofloxacin, the active l-isomer of the quinolone ofloxacin, is now widely accepted for treatment of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis. Because the drug is now widely used, we sought to establish susceptibility test conditions for Mycobacterium tuberculosis against levofloxacin by the traditional reference method, agar proportion (AP), the commonly used BACTEC 460 radiometric system, and the ne...

The susceptibility of 428 clinical isolates of Mycobacterium tuberculosis to pyrazinamide was assessed by the Bactec method and the Wayne pyrazinamidase assay. The correlation between the two tests was 98.2 and 100% for susceptible and resistant strains, respectively. False resistance was seen in four (0.8%) strains with the Bactec test, and false-susceptible results occurred in two (0.5%) pyra...

OBJECTIVES To evaluate the inexpensive colorimetric nitrate reductase-based antibiotic susceptibility (CONRAS) assay for testing the susceptibility of Mycobacterium tuberculosis to streptomycin and ethambutol in liquid cultures, and to compare the CONRAS test with the manual mycobacteria growth indicator tube (MGIT) test, using the radiometric BACTEC 460TB method as reference. METHODS A total...

PURPOSE To evaluate the role of the radiometric BACTEC 460TB system and the conventional Lowenstein-Jensen (LJ) medium for isolation of M. tuberculosis from cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) samples of tuberculous meningitis (TBM) patients. METHODS CSF specimens (n=2325) from suspected TBM patients were processed for isolation of mycobacteria by inoculating BACTEC 12B medium and the LJ medium. The is...

Reproducibility of ethambutol (EMB) susceptibility test results for Mycobacterium tuberculosis has always been difficult for a variety of reasons, including the narrow range between the critical breakpoint for EMB resistance and the MIC for susceptible strains, borderline results obtained with the BACTEC 460TB method, the presence of microcolonies determined using the agar proportion (AP) metho...

OBJECTIVES To determine whether time-to-positivity (TTP) in aerobic and anaerobic blood culture vials is useful to predict the presence of Candida glabrata in patients with candidaemia. METHODS TTP was recorded for both aerobic and anaerobic vials for each blood culture set of monomicrobial candidaemia. We considered TTP as the shortest time registered for any positive vial. Two diagnostic cr...

We evaluated the Hyplex BloodScreen PCR-enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) system (BAG, Lich, Germany), a new diagnostic test for the direct identification of gram-negative bacilli and gram-positive cocci from positive blood cultures, with 482 positive BACTEC 9240 blood culture bottles. The test involves amplification of the bacterial DNA by multiplex PCR and subsequent hybridization of ...