Abstract

Blood cultures are a proven gold standard method for the identification of causative agents of bloodstream infections. Identification of causative organism along with antibiotic susceptibility plays a pivotal role in proposing suitable antibiotic therapy. Automated blood culture systems show improved monitoring of blood cultures by reducing the time and by ensuring more accurate results when compared to the conventional blood culture system. Materials and methods: The study population of the present study included patients admitted to Chalmeda Anand Rao Institute of Medical Sciences. One hundred and ten hospitalized patients who were admitted over a period of 1 year in 12 wards with respiratory infections and their blood culture was requested by the attending physicians by BACTEC method were selected. Sampling was implemented for both methods at the same time. BACTEC method imposed no cost on patients. The characteristics of patients including gender, age, hospitalization period, diagnosis, smoking status, antibiotic use, and day of blood sampling were recorded after determining blood culture results for both the conventional and BACTEC methods. Result: All the 110 blood samples were subjected to both conventional and automated blood culture system. Isolation of bacterial pathogens by culture using the automated system showed 31.8% positivity as compared to 20% by conventional blood culture system. P-value regarding isolation of pathogens by automated systems was found to be significant. In conventional blood culture, S. epidermidis was the commonest isolate 14 (35%) followed by E. Coli 10 (25%), S. aureus 4 (10%), Enterobacter cloacae 4 (10%) Acinetobacter iwoffi 4 (10%) and Candida albicans 4 (10%) (Table 2). Conclusion: Conventional method of blood culture was found to be as efficient as automated blood culture method in respect to rate of isolation of bacteria and yield of bacteria though automated method had significantly shorter mean time of isolation of bacteria than conventional method.

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