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squigglydoodle1 karma

Hello fellow microbiology enthusiast!

I work as a clinical microbiologist at a hospital where a large part of my job is testing organisms against panels of antibiotics.

As I’m sure you know, there are certain drug/bug combos that do not have breakpoint interpretations (we use CLSI’s guide here in the US) and yet my Infectious Disease doctors sometimes ask for us to run certain isolates against these antibiotics anyway. A recently requested example would be fosfomycin against a highly resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa in a urine culture.

Now, I’m sure there is info out there somewhere about it being useful but I’m just curious where they are getting this info from and whether it would be a good idea to just throw some of these drugs at an infection when we do not have breakpoints established to “prove” their effectiveness. Is this good antibiotic stewardship? Or should we be more discouraging of such requests?