Microbiology Culture and Sensitivity

Friday 19th November 2021 ADMIN

Introducing Microbiology Culture and Sensitivity at APEX Medical Laboratories (By Kundai Moyo)

The microbiology laboratory plays a critical role in diagnosis, treatment and management of patients with infectious diseases (Prikazsky, 2016). While one can use rapid tests to diagnose other diseases such as HIV, malaria, its complicated in cases of bacteria infection where there is need to diagnose, isolate the causative organisms and determine the anti-microbiological sensitivity. This is important to prevent antibiotic resistance. Antibiotic resistance problem is making infections like pneumonia, tuberculosis, foodborne disease difficult or impossible to treat as the antibiotics become infective (WHO, 2020).

World Health Organization (WHO) has developed strategic objectives for antimicrobial resistance containment. And one of the ways laboratories can contribute to these goals is to ensure availability of the culture and sensitivity services, report of the drug sensitivity for country and regional surveillance, communicate threats and contribute to risk assessments like providing water testing (Okeke, 2016).

Apex Medical Laboratories take this role seriously. Recently introduced the Microbiology culture and sensitivity for urine and stool samples. The staff were trained by one of the experienced Microbiologists in Malawi; Faheema Choona and Tarsizio Maida. The key learnings were also to use the current guidelines for selecting the appropriate antibiotic discs for the isolated organism and sensitivity determination using the EUCAST

References

Okeke, I. N. (2016). Laboratory systems as an antibacterial resistance containment tool in Africa. African Journal for Laboratory Medicine, 497.

Prikazsky, V. (2016). Field Epidemiology Manual. Wiki.

WHO. (2020). Antibiotic Resistance. World Health Organization.

Tarsizio Maida, Faheema Choona and Kundai Moyo pose for a photo after the training.

Marvouse Kanyenda Jnr, one of the Medical Laboratory Scientist at Apex Medical Laboratories read the sensitivity during the training.