Controlled clinical comparison of BacT/ALERT standard aerobic and standard anaerobic blood culture bottles inoculated directly or after transport in sodium polyanethol sulfonate tubes.

To assess relative performances in the BacT/ALERT blood culture system, we compared results from the direct inoculation of standard media and inoculation after the transport of blood samples in Vacutainer tubes with sodium polyanethol sulfonate. No significant differences in yields or times to detection were found for 387 clinically important isolates from 4,306 blood culture sets.