Comparison of Four Chromogenic Media and Hektoen Agar for Detection and Presumptive Identification of Salmonella Strains in Human Stools
03/2003
We compared the performance of four commercial chromogenic media—namely, ABC medium (Lab M. Ltd., Bury, United Kingdom), COMPASS Salmonella agar (Biokar Diagnostics, Beauvais, France), CHROMagar™ Salmonella agar (CHROMagar Company, Paris, France), and SM ID agar (bioMerieux, Marcy l’Etoile, France)— with conventional Hektoen medium. Nine hundred sixteen stool samples from inpatients at three hospitals were cultured, in parallel, on the five media, both by direct inoculation and after selective enrichment in selenite broth. The specificity of the four chromogenic media was better than 91% after incubation for 24 h (77.7% with Hektoen agar) and better than 84% after incubation for 48 h (74.8% with Hektoen agar). This higher specificity reduces the need for confirmatory tests, thereby cutting technical time and reagent requirements. Both COMPASS agar and CHROMagar™ Salmonella, which after simple additional tests showed close efficiencies (96 and 97%, respectively), can be recommended as single-plate media of choice for the detection and presumptive identification of salmonellae in stools.
