Emerging Data Indicating that Extended Incubation of Blood Cultures Has Little Clinical Value

Abstract

terium avium complex isolates recovered from a patient with AIDS and recovery of 1 Legionella species, all of which were detected using the lysis-centrifugation method) among 215 patients for whom the very extensive special protocol was used. During the same period, 24 HACEK bacteria were detected in ∼14,000 routine blood cultures, all of which were processed in accordance with the laboratory’s standard 5-day incubation protocol. Potential limitations of this study are that the data were generated from a single institution and that the observations may apply to only one of the commercially-available CMBCSs (Bactec; BD Diagnostic Systems). Accordingly, it could be argued that the findings cannot be generalized to other health care centers or other blood culture systems. However, there are emerging data from