L'antibiogramme : diamètres ou CMI ?

The so-called “antibiogram” consists in measuring susceptibility and resistance levels to antibiotics of bacteria responsible for human infections. This review covers some concepts that are essential to a critical analysis of each of the main available methods, particularly the agar diffusion method and the determination of the minimum inhibitory concentrations (MICs): principles of agar diffusion, how break-points are established, epidemiological cut-off, comparison and correlation diameters-MICs, key-parameters of the reliability of each of these methods, importance for the clinical categorization of the frequency and the repartition of the different resistotypes in the bacterial populations.