In the January 2007 issue of the Journal of Clinical Microbiology, Jones et al. reported a multicenter study of the tigecycline disk diffusion breakpoints of Acinetobacter spp., including multidrug-resistant (MDR) strains. The authors concluded that a breakpoint zone diameter of 16/ 12 mm to define susceptibility/resistance, respectively, instead of those proposed by the U.S. Food and Drug Admi...

The amikacin resistance gene aphA6 was first detected in the nosocomial pathogen Acinetobacter baumannii and subsequently in other genera. Analysis of 133 whole-genome sequences covering the taxonomic diversity of Acinetobacter spp. detected aphA6 in the chromosome of 2 isolates of A. guillouiae, which is an environmental species, 1 of 8 A. parvus isolates, and 5 of 34 A. baumannii isolates. Th...

Members of the genus Acinetobacter have been the focus recent attention due to both their clinical significance and application to molecular biology. The soil commensal bacterium Acinetobacter baylyi ADP1 has been proposed as a model system for molecular and genetic studies, whereas in a clinical environment, Acinetobacter spp. are of increasing importance due to their propensity to cause serio...

The blaNDM-1 gene is associated with extensive drug resistance in Gram-negative bacteria. This probably spread to Enterobacteriaceae from Acinetobacter spp., and we characterized plasmids associated with blaNDM-1 in Acinetobacter spp. to gain insight into their role in this dissemination. Four clinical NDM-1-producing Acinetobacter species strains from India and Pakistan were investigated. A pl...

Antibiotic resistance and microbiota within edible snow crabs are important for the Chionoecetes (snow crab) fishing industry. We investigated these parameters using culture methods and antibiotic susceptibility tests with six internal organs from three species of Chionoecetes. Each sample revealed many unexpected microbial species within Chionoecetes internal organs. On the basis of 16S rRNA s...

Recently, Cangelosi and Brabant used oligonucleotide probes targeting the precursor 16S rRNA of Escherichia coli to demonstrate that the levels of precursor rRNA were more sensitive to changes in growth phase than the levels of total rRNA (G. A. Cangelosi and W. H. Brabant, J. Bacteriol. 179:4457-4463, 1997). In order to measure changes in the levels of precursor rRNA in activated sludge system...

Ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP) refers to pneumonia which occurs in people who required mechanical ventilation through an endotracheal or tracheostomy tube for at least 48 hours. The study includes patients of pneumonia who were on mechanical ventilation for more than 48 hours and admitted to the intensive care unit (ICU). During the study period 48 patients developed VAP out of which 51 ...

BACKGROUND & OBJECTIVE Treatment of serious life threatening infections due to multi-drug resistant pathogens presents a difficult challenge due to the limited therapeutic options. Therefore, we studied the in vitro susceptibility of tigecycline, a new glycylcycline with promising broad spectrum of activity against Gram positive and Gram negative bacteria at a tertiary care hospital in north In...

There are 3 main groups of multiple resistant Gram-negative bacteria:  Enterobacteriaceae with ESBL or AmpC enzymes – Escherichia coli, Klebsiella spp., Enterobacter cloacae, Citrobacter freundii, Morganella morganii, Serratia marcescens  Acinetobacter spp. – resistant to aminoglycoside antibiotics as well as occasionally carbapenems and Colistin  Pseudomonas spp. – resistant to combinations...

A study to determine contamination of diluted disinfectants at different points in preparation and use in 6 Malaysian hospitals was done using the in-use test. A growth of > or = 250 organisms/ml was taken as an indication of contamination. A total of 342 (7.9%) of the 4316 freshly diluted samples collected from disinfectant bottles in the pharmacy were found to be contaminated. The bacterial i...