Rapid Identification and Antimicrobial Susceptibility of Gram positive Bacteria Detected in Positive Blood Culture Bottles

Abstract

epsis is the life-threatening condition that arises when the body’s response to an infection injures its own tissues and organs. Despite advances in care, existing epidemiologic studies suggest that sepsis remains a huge burden across all economic regions. Rapid and accurate antimicrobial susceptibility testing is paramount to the management of patients with serious infections, including sepsis. However, conventional antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST) methods take at minimum 2 days to perform from the time the blood culture becomes positive. There is interest in developing AST methods for bacterial blood isolates that can generate data in a more clinically meaningful timeframe. The rapid availability of results should allow early administration of targeted antimicrobial treatment, hereby potentially improving the clinical outcome and also reducing the length of hospital stay and associated costs. A more rapid and optimal therapy furthermore limits antibiotic usage and the development of resistance. The aim of the present study is to validate the direct inoculation method as a rapid method for the identification of Gram-positive bacteremic isolates and determination of their antimicrobial susceptibility profile by comparing its results to that of the standard isolate-based method routinely used in our laboratories.