BACKGROUND A variety of techniques are available for antimicrobial susceptibility testing of Neisseria gonorrhoeae. OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to find a cost-effective, reliable and easily applicable microbiological method to detect antimicrobial susceptibilities of N. gonorrhoeae in resource-poor countries. DESIGN Prospective study. SETTING Male and female STD clinic of Regional...

Recent studies have questioned treatment of serious methicillinresistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infections with vancomycin because of treatment failures, despite vancomycin MICs in the susceptible category (MIC 2 g/ml) (2, 3, 5, 6, 7). Some of these studies have used broth microdilution for determining vancomycin MICs (5), while others have used the Etest commercial product (AB Biodisk, S...

Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) isolates (n = 3,189) from 2,990 patients were investigated by agar screening and by the Etest macromethod for reduced susceptibility to glycopeptide. No vancomycin-resistant S. aureus or glycopeptide-intermediate S. aureus (GISA) isolates were detected, but 178 isolates were confirmed as hetero-GISA (hGISA) by vancomycin population analysis pro...

We compared the susceptibility test results of 220 anaerobes against 14 antimicrobials using the Etest (AB Biodisk, Solna, Sweden) with those using the National Committee for Clinical Laboratory Standards (NCCLS) standard agar dilution method (Wadsworth version). The Etest medium was brucella blood (whole) agar and the inoculum size was equivalent to a no. 1 McFarland standard. Thirty-six perce...

Objective The use of the vancomycin minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) as a prognostic predictor in patients with methicillin-susceptible Staphylococcus aureus (MSSA) has been debated last decade. We performed systematic review and meta-analysis to investigate whether an elevated MIC is associated worse prognosis for MSSA bacteraemia. Design Systematic meta-analysis. Data sources PubMed, Em...

Sir, We read with great interest the study published by Mushtaq et al. about the performance of Oxoid M.I.C.EvaluatorTM (M.I.C.E.) (Thermo Fisher Scientific, Basingstoke, UK) strips compared with those of the Etest (AB bioMérieux, Marcy l’Étoile, France) and agar dilution for determination of MICs using the BSAC guidelines. We recently had the opportunity to carry out a similar study that compa...

Pseudomonas aeruginosa is the most common pathogen infecting the lungs of patients with cystic fibrosis (CF). Improved antimicrobial chemotherapy has significantly increased the life expectancy of these patients. However, accurate susceptibility testing of P. aeruginosa isolates from CF sputum may be difficult because the organisms are often mucoid and slow growing. This study of 597 CF isolate...

Due to the increase in multidrug-resistant Enterobacteriaceae, the interest in older antimicrobial agents, like fosfomycin, has increased. In this study, we used agar dilution for testing susceptibilities to fosfomycin in a collection of 107 carbapenem-nonsusceptible Enterobacteriaceae isolates, of which 80 produced various types of carbapenemases, including KPC, VIM, NDM, and OXA-48. Overall, ...

The performance of Etest KPC and MBL strips (bioMérieux) was evaluated as compared to other phenotypic tests for detecting carbapenemases of the KPC-type and metallo-β-lactamases, respectively, on 133 well-characterized enterobacterial isolates. KPC and meropenem-containing MP/MPI Etest had high sensitivity (>92 %) and specificity (>97 %).

The performance of the Etest using Mueller-Hinton agar supplemented with glucose (2%) and methylene blue (0.5 microg/ml) (MH-GMB) for amphotericin B susceptibility testing of 4,936 isolates of Candida spp. was assessed against that of Etest using RPMI agar with 2% glucose (RPG). MICs were determined by Etest in both media for all 4,936 isolates and were read after incubation for 48 h at 35 degr...