Emerging Infectious Diseases

With the emergence of drug-resistant Streptococcus pneumoniae, community-specific antimicrobial susceptibility patterns have become valuable determinants of empiric therapy for S. pneumoniae infections. Traditionally, these patterns are tracked by active surveillance for invasive disease, collection of isolates, and centralized susceptibility testing. We investigated whether a simpler and less expensive method aggregating existing hospital antibiograms--could provide community-specific antimicrobial susceptibility data. We compared 1996 active surveillance data with antibiogram data from hospital laboratories in Portland, Oregon. Of the 178 S. pneumoniae active surveillance isolates, 153 (86% [95% confidence interval (CI) = 80% to 91%]) were susceptible to penicillin. Of the 1,092 aggregated isolates used by hospitals to generate antibiograms, 921 (84% [95% CI = 82%-87%]) were susceptible to penicillin. With the exception of one hospital's erythromycin susceptibility results, hospital-specific S. pneumoniae susceptibilities to penicillin, cefotaxime, trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole, and erythromycin from the two methods were statistically comparable. Although yielding fewer data than active surveillance, antibiograms provided accurate, community-specific drug-resistant S. pneumoniae data in Oregon.