Antimicrobial Susceptibility Testing: General Principles and Contemporary Practices

著者: J H Jorgensen, Mary Jane Ferraro - Clinical Infectious Diseases 1998 被引用: 169

One of the most important tasks in the clinical microbiology laboratory is the performance of antimicrobial susceptibility tests on significant bacterial isolates. The goal of susceptibility testing is to predict the likely outcome of treating a patient's infection with a particular antimicrobial agent. Empirical therapy continues to be effective for some bacterial pathogens because resistance mechanisms have not yet been acquired or are still rare; examples include penicillin therapy for group A streptococcal infections, erythromycin for legionellosis, and penicillin for N. meningitidis infections in the United States. Susceptibility testing is useful and important for the common bacterial species that are not predictably susceptible to drugs of choice because of acquired resistance mechanisms (e.g., members of the Enterobacteriaceae, Pseudomonas species, Staphylococcus species, Enterococcus species, Streptococcus pneumoniae, Haemophilus influenzae, and Neisseria gonorrhoeae). The two important and related functions of susceptibility testing are the detection of frank resistance and the quantitative measurement of susceptibility to antimicrobial agents with some species that may have direct therapeutic relevance, e.g., the magnitude of the penicillin and cephalosporin MICs for Streptococcus pneumoniae [1-3].