Risk of Contamination Reduced During Blood Culture Collection

A newly developed kit provides a safer and easier process for blood culture collection that can help minimize contamination.

Blood cultures are critical in the early detection stage for sepsis--a severe, whole-body immune response to infection. Sepsis is a serious condition, which is caused by microbes or their toxins in blood or tissues. The new kit minimizes the risk of false-positive results from the lab, which can be expensive for both patients and hospitals.

The new WorkSafe blood culture kit includes BacT/Alert three-dimensional (3D) blood culture bottles, made of a multi-layer polycarbonate instead of glass, which decreases the risk of breakage and blood or body fluid exposures. This improves worker and patient safety by limiting the amount of potential exposure to biohazardous materials. The lightweight plastic bottles can be sent through pneumatic transportation tube systems without custom holders.

Launched by bioMérieux (Marcy l'Etoile, France), the kit is a key element of the company's WorkSafe campaign that equips hospital workers with one simple kit with all necessary components for safe and efficient blood culture-collection. The kit eliminates the need for nurses or phlebotomists to manually pull loose and disparate pieces together for blood culture collection. The kit also contains a disposal bag for all biohazardous materials.

bioMérieux provides diagnostic solutions (reagents, instruments, software), which determine the source of disease and contamination to improve patient health and ensure consumer safety. The products are used for diagnosing infectious diseases and providing high medical value results for cardiovascular emergencies, and cancer screening and monitoring. They are also used for detecting microorganisms in agri-food, pharmaceutic, and cosmetic products.


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