Antimicrobials News

Serum procalcitonin levels do not have sufficient sensitivity or specificity to distinguish bacterial from viral community-acquired pneumonia, according to new study findings published in Clinical Infectious Diseases.

A case report recently published in the Journal of the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society highlighted the first pediatric case of Enterococcus hirae in the United States, and the presentation was a catheter-associated bloodstream infection.

Antibiotic prophylaxis of spontaneous bacterial peritonitis is less effective in cirrhotic patients with known multidrug-resistant organisms, according to a recent study.

Children who are hospitalized with dengue are frequently administered unnecessary antibiotics for presumed bacterial coinfections, according to findings published in PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases. The findings reveal another potential target for antimicrobial stewardship.

The antimicrobial market is broken and not everyone agrees on how to fix it.

Study results suggest that hospitals meeting all seven of the CDC’s Core Elements of Antimicrobial Stewardship Programs use more broad-spectrum antibiotics for community-acquired infections and anti-MRSA agents compared with hospitals that do not meet all of the core elements — a study finding that researchers called “unexpected.”

Researchers have found that leading causes of pneumonia requiring hospitalization in children aged younger than 5 years in low- and middle-income countries throughout Africa and Asia are viral, not bacterial. Specifically, respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, caused the most cases.

Isolated fluoroquinolone resistance had a larger relative impact on mortality than other phenotypic resistance patterns among a cohort of patients with Escherichia coli and Klebsiella species hospital-onset bacteremia, according to study findings.

Results from a multi-center study of hospitalized adults with MRSA bloodstream infections suggest that vancomycin dosing should be guided by the area under the curve, or AUC, not the AUC/MIC ratio, and that day-2 AUCs should be maintained below 515 to maximize efficacy and minimize acute kidney injury, or AKI, researchers reported.

Results from a meta-analysis of observational studies found that oral antibiotic preparation by itself before colorectal surgery reduces the risk for surgical site infections, or SSIs, by 50% and is comparable to combining oral antibiotic preparation with mechanical bowel preparation.