Letter to the Editor
Being Cultured While Culturing
Abstract
To the Editor: Although blood cultures remain the gold standard for the diagnosis of bloodstream infections, they are plagued by false-positive results. The Infectious Diseases Society of America guidelines recommend that ideally, contamination rates not exceed 3%.1 Unfortunately false-positive rates exceed 6% in several scenarios,1,2 resulting in approximately 1.2 million false-positive results annually and costing the US healthcare system roughly $4 billion.3This content is limited to qualifying members.
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