The enemy at your bedside: antibiotic-resistant germs

When Alexander Flemming made the groundbreaking discovery in 1928 that an active ingredient from the brush mold Penicillium notatum could inhibit the growth of many pathogenic bacteria, a new era in global medicine had begun: The age of antibiotics.

Diseases such as scarlet fever, angina and bacterial pneumonia became less frightening. Penicillin and other newly developed antibiotics have since saved the lives of millions of lives.

Adaptable bacteria
Unfortunately, bacteria are highly adaptable organisms. Because of their high reproduction rate and the constant rearrangement of their genetic material, they can adapt very quickly to changing environmental conditions and unfortunately become resistant to previously highly effective antibiotics. What was phenomenally effective yesterday may be ineffective today. About 80 percent of all nosocomial infections are caused by bacteria, primarily Staphylococcus aureus, Escherichia coli, Pseudomonas aeruginosa and enterococci.
Many of these pathogens are actually part of the normal bacterial flora of healthy people and are completely harmless to them. However, they can quickly cause life-threatening diseases such as sepsis, urinary tract infections or respiratory tract infections when they come into contact with people who are immunocompromised or in poor health.

Identifying of effective antibiotics
In order to be able to use the right antibiotic for a particular germ in a sick person quickly and without wasting time, it is important to determine which antibiotics work best aigainst that particular germ. In the microbiology laboratory, antibiotic resistance testing is carried out using agar diffusion tests: The pathogens are inoculated onto an agar plate and then small discs, each soaked with an antibiotic to be tested, are placed on top. The most effective antibiotics are found where large zones of inhibition form in the bacterial lawn.

Automated solutions
This method delivers of testing extremely reliable results in a short time, but is of course very labour-intensive and ties up valuable laboratory manpower. However, there is now a perfect automated solution that uses artifical intelligence to perform this work quickly and on a large scale using: SIRscan ORION, SIRscan LYNX and the expert system SIRxpert.