Importance of Desferrioxamine Susceptibility in Identification of Staphylococcus epidermidis

Abstract

Historically, Staphylococcus epidermidis has been recognized as a contaminant microorganism; recently it is one of the important causes of nosocomial infections. Because of its importance, its identification has been improved with the recent rapid methods. One of the recent methods is Desferrioxamine (DFO) susceptibility by disk diffusion method. In this study, we used DFO susceptibility method to differentiate S. epidermidis from 187 staphylococcus and 5 micrococcus strains. The sensitivity of this method was 100%, the specificity was 90.3% and the efficiency was 94.8% when it was used alone. The efficiency was increased to 100% by the addition of alkalene phosphatase activity and trehalose fermentation. As a result we determined that DFO method was a rapid, easy and reliable method