Staphylococcus aureus Bacteremia, Europe

摘要

To the Editor: In their article,Collignon et al. (1) present a tablecomparing absolute numbers and inci-dence rates of Staphylococcus aureusbacteremia (SAB) in Australia tothose of 5 other countries, and statethat "some data are available fromother countries for comparison" and"only 2 countries, Denmark andEngland, appeared to have compre-hensive collection systems." We would like to add data from theEuropean Antimicrobial ResistanceSurveillance System (EARSS) to theirtable. EARSS is a multinational sur-veillance system that links nationalnetworks by collecting comparableand validated data on the prevalenceof antimicrobial resistance of 5microorganisms, including S. aureus(2). A total of 30 countries participatein EARSS. To ensure representative-ness of the data it publishes, EARSShas set criteria, which can be foundelsewhere (3). In 2003, through a questionnaire,we collected background informationon all hospitals served by laboratoriesparticipating in EARSS, including theestimated hospitals' catchment popu-lations. Proportion of the country pop-ulation covered by EARSS was thencalculated by dividing the sum ofcatchment populations by the totalpopulation of the country (4).Catchment populations of hospitalsproviding single specialty or supra-regional type of care were not count-ed to avoid overlap with other hospi-tals within the same country. Only thecountries that provided denominatordata for at least 60% of the isolateswere included to ensure that the sam-ple of hospitals was still representa-tive of the country as a whole