Of these, 597 had ESBL-PE carriage detected on the admission screening sample (9.5%), mostly with E. coli alone (n = 340, 57%); 246 acquired ESBL-PE carriage, while in the ICU (246/5706 = 4.3%) mostly with E. cloacae or K. pneumonia (n = 192, 78%).
Study design: All VLBW infants born in the province of Québec between October 15 , 1993 and October 15 , 1994 had a second filter paper sample requested at 6 weeks of age to measure thyrotropin and thyroxine, in addition to these measurements for the routine screening sample.
The screening sample that was used for gross validation of methods consisted of three individuals with previously verified large-scale aberrations.
In the VMD statutory surveillance programme there was averaging across multiple aliquots for samples whose initial screening sample gave a high concentration, but not for screening samples with low concentrations.
Similar results were obtained excluding patients with any MRSA positive clinical or screening sample before the current admission (leaving 386 bacteraemias, 1189 bacteraemia/respiratory/sterile site and 2776 clinical samples in total), although the most likely time for the reduction in MRSA bacteraemias to have started was slightly earlier (December 2002 compared with July 2003 in all patients).
We used published conventions for numbering days in each subject for ease of comparison to prior relevant publications: In WEAU and SUMA, day 0 (d0) marks the onset of symptoms; in CH40, d0 denotes the screening sample (symptom onset was self-reported to be 2 days earlier; Table S1).
On the other hand, the optimum screening sample size decreases.
Alloy et al. reported an alpha coefficient of.90 for their screening sample.
The mean age of the screening sample was 12.5 years (SD ± 1.9).
It had an internal consistency of.76 in the full screening sample.
One patient could not be assessed for this parameter as only the screening sample was available.
