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P. Jan Geiseler, MD; Gail Snukst, RN
Veterans Administration West Side Medical Center Chicago

JAMA. 1984;252(21):2957.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

To the Editor.—

The study by Crowson et al¹ highlighted a frequent problem at many large hospitals, namely, inappropriate requests for cultures of CSF for mycobacteria in patients who have no evidence of meningitis. The authors only reported on requests for CSF cultures, but we suspect that they would have also noted overutilization of cultures for mycobacteria in other clinical specimens.

We reviewed the hospital microbiology records between March 1981 and March 1982 at the Veterans Administration West Side Medical Center, a 519-bed inner-city institution in Chicago, and found that 4,953 clinical specimens had been processed for mycobacteria. During that year, 65 patients were hospitalized with culture-proved tuberculosis. The records disclosed for the first month of each quarter in that year no major fluctuations in the number of requests by physicians for mycobacterial cultures. In these four representative months, a total of 1,034 sputum specimens, 173 urine specimens, 153 . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

Footnotes
Edited by John D. Archer, MD, Senior Editor.

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