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Updated: Apr 30, 2026

Isolation and Identification of Waterborne Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria and Molecular Characterization of their Antibiotic Resistance Genes
Published on: March 3, 2023
Validation of antibiotic susceptibility testing guidelines in a routine clinical microbiology laboratory exemplifies
Michael Hombach1, Patrice Courvalin2, Erik C Böttger3
1Institut für Medizinische Mikrobiologie, Universität Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland mhombach@imm.uzh.ch.
Abstract:
This study critically evaluated the new European Committee for Antimicrobial Susceptibility Testing (EUCAST) antibiotic susceptibility testing guidelines on the basis of a large set of disk diffusion diameters determined for clinical isolates. We report several paradigmatic problems that illustrate key issues in the selection of clinical susceptibility breakpoints, which are of general importance not only for EUCAST but for all guidelines systems, i.e., (i) the need for species-specific determinations of clinical breakpoints/epidemiological cutoffs (ECOFFs), (ii) problems arising from pooling data from various sources, and (iii) the importance of the antibiotic disk content for separating non-wild-type and wild-type populations.
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