Annals of Clinical Microbiology and

摘要: Backgrounds: To determine the true incidence of hGISA/GISA and its consequent clinical impact, methods must be defined that will reliably and reproducibly discriminate these resistant phenotypes from vancomycin susceptible S. aureus (VSSA).Methods: This study assessed and compared the ability of eight Dutch laboratories under blinded conditions to discriminate VSSA from hGISA/GISA phenotypes and the intra-and inter-laboratory reproducibility of agar screening plates and the Etest method. A total of 25 blinded and unique strains (10 VSSA, 9 hGISA and 6 GISA) were categorized by the PAP-AUC method and PFGE typed to eliminate clonal duplication. All strains were deliberately added in quadruplets to evaluate intra laboratory variability and reproducibility of the methods. Strains were tested using three agar screening methods, Brain Heart Infusion agar (BHI)+ 6| ig/ml vancomycin, Mueller Hinton agar