Innovative technology of clinical microbiology for respiratory tract infections:present and future / 中华检验医学杂志

ABSTRACT

Respiratory tract infection remains a hot clinical topic.Disappointingly, routine microbiology tests do not meet the needs of target antimicrobial therapy.Widespread practice of antibiotic empiricism has lead to dramatic use of broad-spectrum antibiotics and antimicrobial resistance.The application of new clinical microbiology tests to identify the offending pathogen may allow administration of narrow spectrum antibiotic therapy.To do so,the full clinical microbiology armamentarium with newer point-of-care tests and polymerase chain reaction tests must be exploited.The return of the sputum gram stain and introduction of newer molecular tests would provide information for judicious selection of antimicrobials.