Mrs. Grinstead, who works at the hospital's outpatient, specimen-testing area, sees patients who run the gamut from healthy to terminally ill.
Additionally, we describe antimicrobial resistance patterns over time and, by including both inpatient and outpatient specimens from a wide variety of centers, we limited the referral bias likely present in other studies that examined only inpatients with diarrhea.
For outpatient specimens the reverse was noted; E. coli (38.6%) and S. aureus (14.7%).
Further, the data in Table 1 indicated that MRSA are commonly isolated from all types of outpatient specimens, including blood.
For both inpatient and outpatient specimens, S. aureus and E. coli were the two most common species reported.
Prevalence of MRSA among both inpatient and outpatient specimens continues to increase with multi-drug resistance as a common phenotype.
S. aureus was the most prevalent species isolated from inpatient specimens (18.7% of all bacterial isolates) and the second most prevalent (14.7%) from outpatient specimens.
The overall prevalence of S. aureus isolated from inpatient and outpatient specimens was calculated by using all organism groups and species isolated from each patient group as the denominator.
Demographic data collected included the age and sex of the patient, infection, culture source, inpatient versus outpatient status, specimen accession number, and date of sample collection.
We undertook serosurveys using opportunistically collected outpatient serum specimens from persons across the NT to estimate levels of preexisting immunity and differential attack rates among demographic groups.
Rotavirus was the most common agent detected among AGE patients in this age group in the three hospitals, and was detected in 32.9% (221/672) of inpatient and 24% (23/96) of outpatient stool specimens tested for microbial etiologies.
