I can offer you some basic information about this, but specific treatments
about your case must be from your own doc. I'm not a doctor and the
information is only from the standpoint of the lab.
We quantitate the number of bacteria growing on a plate by culturing a known
volume of urine, counting the colonies and calculating the number of colony
forming units per ml of urine (assuming 1 bacterium = 1 cfu). The number of
colonies that mean a positive is usually set by the medical staff in the
hospital or by the individual docs in a practice. Our docs want to treat
>100,000 cfu/ml in male clean catch urine specimens, but >1000 cfu/ml in cath
male specs. In females they want to treat >100 cfu/ml.
E. coli is the most common isolate we see. There is no attempt to try to
determine what strain it is. It doesn't matter - it found its way into a
place it should not be and must be killed before it spreads to other organs
like the kidneys and into the blood.
It seems like the cipro worked for you. Your next culture should be
negative. It is important to stay on top of the situation. If this is a
recurring situation you might need to find out where it's coming from.
My wife was plagued with UTIs for many years starting around childhood. She
lost a kidney and has had several operations to fix things. The final fix
was a tri-section of her bladder in order to remove an abscessed piece that
was seeding her infection. They sewed it back together (1/3 smaller) and
she's been fine ever since.
I'm not a fan of home remedies so I won't comment on them.
--
John Gentile Rhode Island Apple Group
yjgent at home.com President
"I never make mistakes, I only have unexpected learning opportunities"
> From: johnwater at hotmail.com ("Hotmail")
> Organization: BIOSCI/MRC Human Genome Mapping Project Resource Centre
> Newsgroups: bionet.microbiology
> Date: 7 Feb 2001 21:01:20 -0000
> Subject: urine culture
>> i have had positve urine culture e,coli.2-3 weeks on cirpro antibiotic and
> repeat culture is negative.now i am off cipro and will have another urine
> culture in 2 weeks.
> what constitutes a positve culture?how are cultures quantified with respect
> to the number of pathogens?
> i read where there are different strains of the e.coli.does the culture
> determine what specific strain is present?
> my infection has come and gone in the pass.if i knew what particular strain
> was causing this,would this help to treat it more effectively?i have read
> about d-mannose rx,also certain cytokines which may be necessary for
> bettertreatment.thanks for your advice
>>> ---
