Vol. 4, Issue 7, Part F (2018)

Abstract
Urinary tract infections (UTI) are important clinical entities, making urine, the most frequent sample received for culture in clinical microbiology laboratory's daily workload. Traditionally conventional media like Blood agar (BA) and MacConkey agar (MAC) are being used in combination by most of the laboratories in developing countries. Moreover, they are unsuitable as an ideal primary isolation medium and chromogenic agar medium like HiCrome UTI Agar is a differential medium recommended for it. The present study was undertaken to validate the usefulness of HiCrome UTI agar as a primary urine culture medium for its rate of isolation and presumptive identification of uropathogens in comparison to BA and MAC Agar in a Nair Hospital, in Mumbai. Patients included were randomly selected 3300 subjects who were married pregnant and non-pregnant women reporting to ANC clinic of the hospital of age group of 18 to 40 years. Collection, Transportation, Processing of urine, microscopic examination and Urine culture was carried out by standard methods. HiChrome UTI agar, BA and MAC agar were used simultaneously. Antibiotic sensitivity testing of test isolates (200 gram negative and 52 gram positive) bacteria were done, which were separately collected from Hichrome UTI, BA and MAC agar, to check the susceptibility pattern of isolates, isolated from different agar. Both HiCrome UTI agar and BA supported more than 75 % bacterial growth, while MAC agar supported 52.30% growths. For presumptive identification of bacterial species, of 259 bacterial isolates, 99.40% could be differentially identified on HiCrome UTI agar against 49.0% and 81.0% on BA and MAC agar respectively. Comparative results of three culture media for their rate of isolation of polymicrobial growth of uropathogens showed that HiCrome UTI agar supported 100% bacterial growth, while BA and MAC agar supported 40% bacterial growth each. Susceptibility pattern of all the isolates collected from HiCrome UTI^TM, BA & MAC agar was found to be similar. Cost of HiCrome UTI^TM agar per test per urine sample was found to be less than traditional identification methods. Hence, the study shows that HiCrome UTI agar is an excellent and time saving media for the reliable identification of most of the uropathogens and differentiation of mixed bacterial cultures in primary culture plate as compared to conventional culture system.