Rewriting Life

Infection Detection

Feb 19, 2008

Multi-drug-resistant staph infections have emerged as the most common skin and soft-tissue infections in the United States. If they reach the bloodstream, they can turn deadly. A new genetic test, which works on blood cultures, takes only a few hours to identify drug-resistant staph, where previous tests took days. The test kit includes reagents that detect DNA sequences characteristic of the drug-resistant and the garden-variety strains of the bacterium.


Credit: Courtesy of BD Diagnostics