On 4 Oct 1995, ROCKBUGS wrote:
>Just this week, our system told me I had
> 99.9% Pseudomonas cepacia, but I *knew* it was really Xanthomonas
> maltophilia - my nose knew better than than the machine, and I eventually
> proved it! Micro is more or less like a good detective novel. Enjoy!
> How about some input from those with more letters after their names than
> I?
> Kathy
Kathy and ROCKBUGS,
It has been too long since I worked clinical micro (10+ years) to be
of any help for the original question. Kathy brought up an interesting
point in her post, though. Back when I did ID bugs for a living, I was
almost always able to ID to the genus level just on the smell of the bug
alone. Usually I could speciate as well. The few times that there was
a difference between my olfactory ID and the API 20e, it turned out that
I was right. At the time I was working in the army as a labtech/grunt,
and so my peculiar talent was not especially appreciated ;), and no one
really seemed interested in talking much about how the bugs smelled...
Six years later when I was TA'ing undergrad "Micro for Nursing
students" in grad school, I found it was still easier to ID by nose than
by biochemical profile. I was wondering if any other clinical
bacteriologists relied on their noses for presumptive ID of bacteria.
Peter Charles, PhD
Department of Pathology (Neuropathology)
Albert Einstein College of Medicine
