Fluconazole susceptibility testing of Candida inconspicua clinical isolates: comparison of four methods

Since uconazole is the most widely used drug in the clinicalsetting, and in the case of rare Candida species susceptibilitytest results may precede denitive identication (24 or 48h ver-sus 48 or 72h), the method used for susceptibility testing shouldbe suitable to correctly determine the uconazole susceptibilitynot only of the four most frequent species, but also of relativelyfrequently isolated rare species.The aim of our study was to evaluate Etest, Fungitest andmodied BMD methods as alternatives for determination ofuconazole susceptibility of our C. inconspicua clinicalisolates and to compare their agreement with the standardmethod.The isolates studied included 57 C. inconspicua strainsisolated from 48 patients during a 3 year period (2001–2003).Twenty-two of the 42 hospitalized patients were immunocom-promised and 15 were hospitalized in seven different intensivecare units. Eleven patients received uconazole previously. Themajority of specimens were from the upper and lower respiratorytract (16 and 24, respectively), but wound, blood and genital iso-lates were also obtained. Inpatients were treated at 10 separateclinics at different times.Identication of the isolates was carried out as described ear-lier.