Results and costs of the first six months experience with BACTEC NR-730 were compared with a series of blood cultures performed by the conventional method previously used. The newer technology detected the growth of 14.1% of significant isolates on the day of receipt of the specimens. The previous method lacked blind subcultures on the day of receipt and therefore detected growth only after ove...

Mycoplasma hominis has been implicated as an important cause of septicaemia. There have been reported variances in the ability of blood culture systems to support the growth of this organism. In this study the ability of the BACTEC 9000 series automated system to grow and detect M hominis was assessed. Three of five wild M hominis strains grew in the BACTEC Anaerobic Plus/F medium but growth wa...

Blood culture bottles that accept up to 10 ml of blood have recently been introduced for the BACTEC nonradiometric blood culture system. The new formulation, designated BACTEC Plus, contains 25 ml of tryptic soy broth, 0.05% sodium polyanetholesulfonate, and mixed resins. In a collaborative study conducted at three university hospitals, we evaluated the BACTEC Plus 26 (BP26) aerobic bottle and ...

Bactec NR-660, a computerised blood culture system using infrared analysis of microbial generated carbon dioxide, was compared with the Signal system, which detects gaseous pressure (due to bacterial metabolism) by a manometer. Four trials were undertaken: an in vitro evaluation of 99 bacteria in simulated blood cultures, and three prospective comparisons of a total of 2588 paired patient sampl...

An automated blood culture system (BACTEC 9240) was used for the isolation of aerobic bacteria from the blood of septicaemic neonatal calves. Blood samples were collected from 90 clinically septicaemic and 20 healthy neonatal calves and inoculated into blood culture bottles. There were 89 significant isolates from 90 positive blood cultures using the BACTEC system. Escherichia coli was the most...

Of 50 blood culture sets, 20 Bacto (Difco Laboratories, Detroit, Mich.), 20 Septi-Chek (Hoffmann-La Roche, Inc., Nutley, N.J.), and 10 BACTEC 6B and 7D (Johnston Laboratories, Inc., Towson, Md.) sets were inoculated with Campylobacter pylori and fresh human blood. None of the 50 blood cultures produced any detectable growth. Current commercial blood culture systems may be inadequate for the det...

The BACTEC NR730 blood culture system is a commercially available system which utilizes infrared spectrophotometry to detect bacterial growth in broth media inoculated with the blood specimen. The objective of this study is to compare this system with the conventional system used in our laboratory. A total of 479 blood samples were collected from adult patients in the Klang TAR Hospital and ino...

Recently, newly reported causes of fungal peritonitis associated with continuous ambulatory peritoneal dialysis were described both in this journal and in another (6, 7). These episodes threatened to go undetected due to false-negative culture results in the initial investigations. Each of these cases involved inoculation of peritoneal dialysis (PD) fluid into BACTEC (Becton Dickinson) blood cu...

The sensitivity of the BACTEC NR660 blood culture system was assessed by using paired bottles of anaerobic (NR7A) and resin-containing aerobic (NR16A) media and conditions and organisms which simulated those found in pediatric practice. Corresponding media (7D and 16B) of the established BACTEC 460 radiometric method served as controls. The performances of the two systems were similar with 50 i...

To determine whether acridine orange (AO) staining of blood cultures could be used as a substitute for blind subculture when used in conjunction with the BACTEC system (Johnston Laboratories, Inc., Towson, Md.), the two methods were compared on all BACTEC-negative specimens. Since blind subcultures were routinely performed in our laboratory on days 2 and 6 of incubation, AO staining was also pe...