Clinical Evaluation of Blood Culture Procedure in Children

Comparison of BBL Blood Culture Bottle with BCB System “ROCHE”

Abstract

Sepsis is known to occur most frequently among children with malignancies mainly leukemia and newborns, but the isolation rate of bacteria is lower in those patients, as it should be.
As we have noticed in daily pediatric practice, the results of blood culture come not infrequently negative when the bacteremia is strongly suspected. To expose our present status of bacterial isolation by blood culturing, we reviewed the results of 1, 263 culture bottles, which were obtained during the last 4 years, from children clinically suspected for sepsis. Blood culture was performed 8 to 10 times more frequently among children with malignancies, as compared with infectious children with or without other underground disease entities, and blood culture was positive in 5.0% with BBL culture bottle and in 7.0% with BCB culture bottle. Among bacteria isolated, gram negative bacilli occupied in 65.9%, and K. pneumoniae, S. aureus and E. coli were the commonest bacteria.
The artificial contamination was encountered 6 times more frequently with BCB bottle and this was significant statistically with P value of less than 0.005. The contaminants were mainly S. epidermidis and aerobic gram positive bacilli.
At the time of diagnosis, WBC was less than 500/mm³ with leukemic children and more than 5, 000/mm³ with newborns.