Journal of Clinical Case Reports

Performance Comparison of Francis Media with Other Methods in the Identification of Burkholderia pseudomallei

Abstract

Hashim R, Hamzah H, Zain MN, Hadi ZLA and Francis AL

Burkholderia pseudomallei is the causative agent for melioidosis, severe infection that is associated with high morbidity and mortality. Difficulties in laboratory diagnosis of melioidosis may delay the treatment and as a result, affect disease outcomes. Culture is the mainstay for laboratory diagnosis of the disease followed by further commercial biochemical testing for identification of organism. The whole process may take up to 72 hours. Furthermore, commercial identification system may fail to distinguish between B. pseudomallei and closely related species like B. cepacia. The objective of this study was to compare the efficacy of Francis media against commercial identification system such as API20NE and VITEK2GN for the identification of B. pseudomallei. This study showed that Francis media was 100% reliable in the identification of B. pseudomallei as compared to others. The media also offered fast identification of organism from clinical specimen with total incubation time required of only 18 hours. API20NE was able to correctly identify only 5 (12.5%) within 24 hours and 31 (78%) within 48 hours of incubation. VITEK2GN, identified 95% of the isolates correctly within 9 hours of incubation. However, both methods required an additional sub culturing prior to testing. Molecular method was used as the confirmatory method for identification of the isolate.