Pneumococcal Septic Arthritis among Adults, France, 2010-2018.

Streptococcus pneumoniae infection is considered an uncommon cause of arthritis in adults. To determine the clinical and microbiological characteristics of pneumococcal septic arthritis, we retrospectively studied a large series of cases among adult patients during the 2010-2018 conjugate vaccine era in France. We identified 110 patients (56 women, 54 men; mean age 65 years), and cases included 82 native joint infections and 28 prosthetic joint infections.

β-Lactam Inoculum Effect in Methicillin-Susceptible Staphylococcus aureus Infective Endocarditis.

Importance: Infective endocarditis (IE) caused by Staphylococcus aureus is associated with high mortality, approximately 20% to 30%, mostly in the first month, with no improvement in recent decades. Current opinion is that antistaphylococcal penicillin and cefazolin are equally effective in treating methicillin-susceptible S aureus (MSSA) IE, and both are recommended as possible first-line treatments. Most MSSA strains carry the β-lactamase blaZ gene, and some blaZ-positive strains exhibit an inoculum effect, meaning increased minimum inhibitory concentrations at high inoculum.

Comparative performances of the Qvella FAST system and conventional methods for rapid identification and antibiotic susceptibility testing on monomicrobial positive blood cultures.

Rapid and accurate diagnosis of sepsis is of paramount importance to reduce associated morbidity and mortality. The Qvella FAST System is a new instrument that concentrates and purifies bacteria from positive-flagged blood culture bottles (PFBCBs) to produce a "liquid" colony comparable to a subcultured colony in less than 40 min for rapid ID and calibrated antibiotic susceptibility testing (AST). In this study, we evaluated performances of the FAST System workflow and our rapid routine manual workflow (bacterial pellet obtained after lysis, cleaning, washing, and centrifugation for ID; AST by disc diffusion by direct inoculation after dilution) by comparison to the reference method based on 24-h bacterial subcultures.