Abstract
For many years Serratia was considered incapable of causing human infections, but more recently this organism has been recognized as a cause of infections in patients with chronic debilitating diseases. The urinary tract has been the most common site of such infections, especially in patients using indwelling catheters for obstructive diseases.
This study was done to assess the incidence and significance of Serratia in urinary tract infec-tions and to investigate the clinical picture of the patients infected.
In the 2 year period, 1973-1974, there has been a striking increase in the incidence of S. marcescens isolated from the urine of hospitalized patients.
Urine from 53 patients showed S. marcescens in 124 cultures with more than 100,000 colonies per milliliter.
Most of the patients were suffered from urogenital diseases, disorders of central nervous system, or carcinomatosis. The percentage of postoperative patients was high. From these facts, the opportunistic or nosocomial nature of S. marcescens was demonstrated by the high percentage of patients with factors lowering host resistance.
As urinary tract instrumentations (with or without obstruction present) were performed on most of the patients, the correlation of catheterization with positive urine cultures for S. marcescens was very high. The route of infection could not determined, but it was suggested that catheterization or instrumentation of urinary tract was probably responsible.
All but threecases had received antibiotic treatment, mostly cephalosporins, sulbenicillin and ampicillin before S. marcescens was isolated.
This study showed that Serratia infections are an important component of hospital infection and no longer possible to consider this organism as nonpathogen.
