Stability of four carbapenem antibiotics in discs used for antimicrobial susceptibility testing
Bibliographic record
Abstract
AIMS: In low- to middle-income countries, microbiology laboratories often use disc diffusion for antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST). Transport and storage conditions of materials used for AST are critical and may be challenging in remote, low-resource settings where temperature cannot always be controlled. This study aimed to test the stability of four carbapenem antibiotics in discs for AST under such unfavourable conditions. METHODS AND RESULTS: Imipenem, meropenem, ertapenem, and doripenem discs from three brands (Oxoid, Becton Dickinson, HiMedia) were included. The discs were exposed to six unfavourable conditions (i.e. at room temperature and 35°C for up to 72 h) and the recommended storage condition as control. Subsequently, disc diffusion testing following EUCAST guidelines was performed with four well-defined Escherichia coli strains. In parallel, the carbapenems' degradation was observed using a spectrophotometric method. Carbapenems in discs were generally stable in unfavourable conditions although the concentration of most decreased over time. Overall, imipenem (Oxoid and Becton Dickinson) discs were the most stable. Meropenem discs were less stable at 35°C than at room temperature. Carbapenem concentrations in HiMedia discs were higher than those in Oxoid and Becton Dickinson. CONCLUSIONS: Imipenem in discs for AST showed to be the most stable carbapenem under unfavourable conditions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".