Cefotaxime: in vitro activity and tentative interpretive standards for disk susceptibility testing

Tested against 9,412 recent clinical isolates, cefotaxime exhibited 8 to 64 times greater activity against the Enterobacteriaceae than did cephalothin and two to four times greater activity against Pseudomonas aeruginosa, but only one-half to one-eighth the activity of cephalothin against staphylococci. Using 420 different clinical isolates, but with comparable minimal inhibitory concentration (MIC) distributions, disk diffusion-MIC regression analyses were performed, using 5- and 30-micrograms cefotaxime disks. Cefotaxime MIC susceptible and resistant breakpoints of less than or equal to 8 and greater than 32 micrograms/ml are tentatively proposed. Based on the MIC breakpoints, the data showed the best discrimination among the three susceptibility categories (susceptible, indeterminate, and resistant) when the 30-micrograms cefotaxime disk was used. The zone diameter breakpoints as determined by the error rate-bounded method and regression analysis were greater than or equal to 23 mm for susceptible, 15 to 22 mm for indeterminate, and less than or equal to 14 mm for resistant.