Prevalence of antibiotic resistance in US hospitals

The percentage of isolates resistant to essential antibiotics among clinically significant bacterial pathogens was evaluated using data from 80 089 qualifying admissions in 19 US hospitals (2007–2010). Percentage resistant was highest for the following pathogen/antibiotic pairs: Enterococcus faecium/vancomycin (87.1% [95% CI 86.0–88.1] of 4024 isolates), Staphylococcus aureus/oxacillin–methicillin (56.8% [56.1–57.4] of 23 477 isolates), S. aureus/clindamycin (39.7% [39.1–40.4] of 21 133 isolates), Pseudomonas aeruginosa/fluoroquinolones (32.6% [31.8–33.5] of 10 982 isolates), and Escherichia coli/fluoroquinolones (31.3% [30.8–31.8] of 30 715 isolates). The percentage resistant was 3.9% (3.2–4.9) for E. faecium/daptomycin (n = 2029 isolates). While these results are consistent with those from earlier studies in many respects, the percentage of E. faecium isolates resistant to daptomycin, while still small, is higher than has been reported to date.