What is Bacterial Susceptibility Testing?
Bacterial Susceptibility Testing When a doctor suspects that a patient has a bacterial infection, he orders a “culture and susceptibility test” to help determine the cause. (Your doctor may refer to this as a “culture and sensitivity,” – sensitivity is a more casual term for susceptibility that has been widely used.) Susceptibility is the likelihood that a particular antimicrobial will be effective in killing or sufficiently inhibiting the growth of specific pathogen that is causing an infection. Susceptibility testing measures whether or not the microorganism can grow when it is exposed to a variety of antimicrobials in a laboratory test. A culture of the infected area must be done to obtain the organism for identification and to allow susceptibility testing to be performed if warranted. Referred to by the type of body fluid or cells collected (such as: blood culture, urine culture, sputum culture, wound culture, etc.), the culture involves incubating a sample at body temperature in a
