Prevalence, Diagnosis and Local Susceptibility of Staphylococci Infections

Abstract

Staphylococci are normally harmless commensals occurring on the skin, mucous membrane and the general environment. However, they are increasingly implicated in different infectious states. Of particular interest is the advent of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) with its attendance resistance to beta lactam antibiotics. Several infectious states are now emerging with staphylococci being implicated in the infections, e.g. S. saprophyticus has been implicated in urogenital infection. It would be interesting to document the prevalence of staphylococci in different infectious state. The identification of staphylococci is supposed to be a straightforward procedure, but an alarming misidentification rate is emerging in low resource laboratories, especially in places where identification is solely by growth and fermentation on mannitol salt agar (MSA). Finally, empirical treatment of any staphylococci infection will depend on local suspectibility pattern of the strains as the susceptibilities vary from environment to environment. This chapter summarizes the current knowledge regarding the prevalence, diagnosis and local susceptibility of staphylococci in different parts of the world