At present, most Neisseria gonorrhoeae testing is done with
beta-lactamase and agar dilution tests with common therapeutic agents.
Generally, in bacteriological diagnosis laboratories in Argentina, study of
antibiotic susceptibility of N.gonorrhoeae is based on
beta-lactamase determination and agar dilution method with common
therapeutic agents. The National Committee for Clinical Laboratory
Standards (NCCLS) has recently described a disk diffusion test that
produces results comparable to the reference agar dilution method for
antibiotic susceptibility of N.gonorrhoeae, using a dispersion
diagram for analyzing the correlation between both techniques. We obtained
57 gonococcal isolates from patients attending a clinic for sexually
transmitted diseases in Tucuman, Argentina. Antibiotic susceptibility tests
using agar dilution and disk diffusion techniques were compared. The
established NCCLS interpretive criteria for both susceptibility methods
appeared to be applicable to domestic gonococcal strains. The correlation
between the MIC's and the zones of inhibition was studied for penicillin,
ampicillin, cefoxitin, spectinomycin, cefotaxime, cephaloridine,
cephalexin, tetracycline, norfloxacin and kanamycin. Dispersion diagrams
showed a high correlation between both methods. {P}
