This study assessed the recovery rates of Gram-negative bacilli from stored endotracheal aspirates frozen with and without glycerol. Samples frozen with glycerol showed a significant difference in isolate recovery, 89.7% versus 69.2% (P = 0.02). This study demonstrates that it is possible to achieve high recovery rates of potentially pathogenic organisms from endotracheal aspirates when stored ...

The description by Cheron et al. (1) of an outbreak of hospital-acquired infections due toAlcaligenes denitnfi cans and other nonfermenting gram-negative bacilli was reminiscent of a similar outbreak at our hospital. During a 1-month period there were 11 cases of mixed bacterial infections involving Acinetobacter anitratus, Flavobacterium meningosepticum, and Xanthomonas maltophila in our 15-be...

Major problems are being experienced in human medicine from antibiotic resistant bacteria [ 11. Furthermore, no new chemical class of antibiotics has been introduced into medicine in the past two decades [2]. Although many antibiotic structures have been subjected to intensive chemical manipulation to yield novel derivatives with extended activity spectra, resistance to such antibiotics has usu...

A production model of the autoSCAN-4 system (American MicroScan, Inc., Mahwah, N.J.) was tested with not more than 11 strains each of 73 groups or species of gram-negative bacilli from various Centers for Disease Control culture collections. The strains included typical and atypical strains of enteric fermenters, nonenteric fermenters, and nonfermenters. The autoSCAN-4 system identified 95.3% o...