COMPARATIVE STUDY BETWEEN CONVENTIONAL AND AUTOMATED METHODS IN DIAGNOSIS OF HOSPITAL ACQUIRED INFECTION

Abstract

Nosocomial infections represent a major hazard in health care facilities, their effects are on the infected patients, their families and the health care system.

Increasingly, microbes are becoming resistant to a substantial proportion of drugs which considered the first line treatment, this often necessitate the use of more costly antimicrobial agents. Such resistance is having an impact not only on the therapy of the individual patients but also on the infection control in the hospital.

Automation was introduced into the clinical microbiology laboratory in the late 1960s. Since that time improvement in technology and the introduction of computerized data analysis have made mechanization practical and allowed its applications to expand. Today instruments have many uses in the microbiology laboratory as isolation and detection of organisms in clinical specimens, identification of isolates and testing the susceptiblity of isolates to antimicrobial agents.

The purpose of the present study was to identify current nosocomial pathogens. It also aimed to compare species identification obtained by Microscan Walkaway 40 and Sensititre autoreader system with those obtained by conventional methods (routine tube biochemical tests and BBL crystal enteric non fermenter ID kit in case of gram negative bacilli and catalase, coagulase, DNase, bacitracin, bile solubility and streptex in case of gram positive cocci) to devise a method for the identification which is technically simple, accurate and rapid.