We are a small lab in south India. We would mainly like to id group A
strept at least. We use Bacitracin 0.04u disks. We use latex
agglutination or coaaglutination reagent as per availabilty. I have
worked with gorup A strept earlier in another hospital too, but we
again had this problem with blood agar because nobody wants to maintain
sheep as out animal laws are pretty strict now, and it also requires
extra expenditure. So in many labs especially where money is a
constraint, identifying group A streptococci is not the top priority on
the list. Many times it is not even on the list !! Which brings us to
god knows how may streptococcal we let slip through our hands to go on
to become rheumatic fever cases.
So options are :
1 . use blood agar. Get sheep/ horse blood. Trying, not holding up very
well.
2. new thought : could there be some other way to id any gram positive
cocci in chains to see if they are beta haemolytic. So I'd like to get
into some material on how exactly streptolysin works, ---- and so on.
Which is why I'd put up this message to see if anyone else had any
similar (rather ridiculous) thoughts.
anyway thanks for writing in. And please let me know if you happen upon
any such test/material.
