BACKGROUND Mortality for candidemia ranges from 15% to 35%. Current guidelines recommend inoculating blood into three aerobic and three anaerobic blood culture bottles when candidemia is suspected, without mention of a fungal blood culture bottle. OBJECTIVE To determine the value of the BACTEC Myco/F Lytic blood culture media in the diagnosis of fungemia. METHODS A two-year retrospective cr...

Two strains of fastidious mycobacteria were isolated from two patients with AIDS and clinical disease suggestive of Mycobacterium avium complex infection. Acid-fast bacilli were isolated from blood and bone marrow of both patients in BACTEC 12B and/or 13A media. The acid-fast bacilli failed to grow on subculture to routine Löwenstein-Jensen medium containing pyruvate and egg yolk agar. After se...

A commercially available agar-slide blood culture bottle (Septi-Chek; Roche Diagnostics, Div. Hoffman-La Roche, Inc., Nutley, N.J.) was compared with the radiometric blood culture system (BACTEC; Johnston Laboratories, Inc., Towson, Md.) in 8,544 paired blood cultures from adult patients. The systems were inoculated with equal volumes (10 ml) of blood. Overall, there was no statistically signif...

A prospective study of 111 adult patients with a pleural effusion was carried out in an area with a high prevalence of tuberculosis to compare the yield of bedside with laboratory inoculation of pleural fluid, and the yield and speed of a radiometric mycobacterial culture system (BACTEC) with that of conventional culture. The use of adenosine deaminase activity in pleural fluid as a diagnostic ...

A case of Mycobacterium tuberculosis bacteremia in an HIV negative immunodepressed patient was described using the BACTEC 460 TB system. This bacterium should be investigated in the blood of immunodepressed non-HIV infected patients with prolonged fever.

Mycobacterium chelonei ss abscessus was isolated from a subcutaneous abscess that had been submitted in Bactec blood culture bottles. Detection occurred in three days as compared to seven days in classical mycobacterial media.

Surveillance of bloodstream infections (BSI) is a high priority within the hospital setting. Broth-based blood cultures are the current gold standard for detecting BSI, however they can require lengthy incubation periods prior to detection of positive samples. We set out to demonstrate the feasibility of using enzymatic template generation and amplification (ETGA)-mediated measurement of DNA po...

Mycobacterium tuberculosis converts pyrazinamide to its active form by using the enzyme pyrazinamidase. This enzyme is coded for on the pncA gene, and mutations in the pncA gene result in absence of active enzyme, conferring resistance to the drug pyrazinamide. We investigated 27 strains of Mycobacterium tuberculosis suspected of being multidrug resistant. Each isolate was tested for susceptibi...

SETTING A Mycobacteriology Reference Laboratory in Johannesburg, South Africa. OBJECTIVE To determine the ability of FASTPlaqueTB-RIF, a rapid bacteriophage-based test, to correctly identify rifampicin susceptibility in clinical strains of Mycobacterium tuberculosis after growth in the Bactec 460 semi-automated liquid culture system. DESIGN A comparative study of FASTPlaqueTB-RIF and conven...