Oregon State Public Health Lab Modifies CRE Test to ID Superbug in Hours

A relatively new test has been developed to identify a dangerous form of antibiotic resistance.

Researchers from Oregon State Public Health Lab have modified the protocol to increase the specificity of the simple and inexpensive test to 100 percent, to provide results in hours.

The research has confirmed the reliability of a test, called Carba NP, which can be conducted in practically any clinical laboratory and allows for rapid identification of carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE), often referred to as "super bugs" for their ability to resist most major antibiotics.

Karim Morey of the Oregon State Public Health Lab, and author on the study, said that CRE is currently considered an urgent public health threat by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as it is rapidly spreading around the globe, and its timely detection is critical to patient care and infection control.

Morey added that the Carba NP test is highly sensitive, specific and reproducible for the detection of carbapenemase production in a diverse group of organisms.

The research was presented at the 54th Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, an infectious disease meeting of the American Society for Microbiology.