External Quality Assessment Evaluating the Ability of Dutch Clinical Microbiological Laboratories to Identify .

Background: is a yeast that is causing nosocomial outbreaks in healthcare facilities around the world. There is a risk of the misidentification of with matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization-time of flight mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF MS)-when libraries are used that lack spectra, or when conventional biochemical methods are used.

Methods: We conducted an external quality assessment to evaluate the ability of Dutch clinical microbiological laboratories to identify , and to raise awareness about the risk of misidentification.

Antifungal Susceptibility Testing of Fusarium: A Practical Approach.

In vitro susceptibility testing of is becoming increasingly important because of frequency and diversity of infections and because resistance profiles are species-specific. Reference methods for antifungal susceptibility testing (AFST) are those of Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute (CLSI) and European Committee on Antimicrobial Susceptibility (EUCAST), but breakpoints (BPs) have not yet been established. One of the problems is that phylogenetic distances between species are much smaller than between species of, e.

Antifungal Susceptibility of Emerging Dimorphic Pathogens in the Family Ajellomycetaceae.

The susceptibilities of 24 molecularly identified dimorphic fungi belonging to the genera , , and within the family were tested against 8 standard antifungal agents using CLSI document M38-A2. Amphotericin B and posaconazole had the lowest geometric mean MICs (<0.05 μg/ml) followed by itraconazole (<0.

Antifungal Susceptibility Testing of Candida Isolates with the EUCAST Methodology, a New Method for ECOFF Determination.

The susceptibilities of 1,099 molecularly identified clinical isolates against 8 antifungal drugs were determined using the EUCAST microdilution method. A new simple, objective, and mathematically solid method for determining epidemiological cutoff values (ECOFFs) was developed by derivatizing the MIC distribution and determining the derivatized ECOFF (dECOFF) as the highest MIC with the maximum second derivative. The dECOFFs were similar (95% agreement within 1 dilution) to the EUCAST ECOFFs.

Intra- and Interlaboratory Agreement in Assessing the In Vitro Activity of Micafungin against Common and Rare Candida Species with the EUCAST, CLSI, and Etest Methods.

The emergence of resistant strains among common and rare Candida species necessitates continuous monitoring of the in vitro susceptibilities of those isolates. We therefore assessed the in vitro activities of micafungin against 1,099 molecularly identified isolates belonging to 5 common and 20 rare Candida species by the EUCAST, CLSI, and Etest methods, assessing both the intralaboratory agreement and the interlaboratory agreement for two centers. The median micafungin EUCAST MICs were as follows, from the lowest to the highest: for Candida albicans, 0.