Development of resistance in the past decade in central Europe

In a multicentre study conducted by the Paul-Ehrlich-Gesellschaft we tested about 35,000 bacterial isolates from different hospitals in the Federal Republic of Germany, Berlin (West), Austria and Switzerland between 1975 and 1984. None of the bacterial species under test showed an increase in the number of resistant strains. A slight decrease in the percentage of resistant strains to some antibiotics was observed with Staphylococcus aureus; Klebsiella spp. showed a significant decrease in this respect. Because of this phenomenon and the introduction of new drugs, chemotherapy today is usually safer than ten years ago. However, in some places the amount of resistant strains was significantly different from the overall resistance. In comparison of these data with those from the U.S.A. (Atkinson & Lorian, 1984) no difference in an antibiotic-species pair exceeded 13%.