[Antibiotherapy in biliary surgery. Current status]

Without antibiotherapy, biliary surgery is often followed by infectious complications, possibly serious, indeed life-threatening. Biliary bacteria do are responsible of these complications; mainly E. Coli, Streptococcus faecalis (whose pathogenicity is disputed) and Klebsiella. Bacteroides fragilis and Pseudomonas aeruginosa are restricted to special circumstances. It is often difficult to presee whether bile is infected: some risk factors were emerged by Keighley but their specificity is not excellent; peroperative Gram staining got various results according to the studies. Some prefer to give a systematic antibiotherapy. Preoperative antibiotic treatment should be as short as possible because it does not sterilize bile, but selects resistant bacteria, which induce postoperative complications. It must mainly be aimed at preventing infectious scattering. Surgery is the main part of the treatment. Antibiotic choice has to take into account clinical picture, bacteria (those probably responsible for and their sensibility) and goal of the treatment (prophylactic or curative). Analysis of failures should allow to improve this choice. But only multicenter studies concerning full selected populations of patients are able to prove superiority of one antibiotic to another.