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On 31 January 2019, Erica Stohs from the Department of Medicine, University of Washington School of Medicine, Seattle, WA, USA, and colleagues published in the Biology of Blood and Marrow Transplantation, the results of a retrospective study assessing the value of weekly surveillance blood cultures (SBCs) drawn in an outpatient setting from patients receiving hematopoietic cell transplant (HCT) and high-dose steroids. The researchers hypothesized that all positive outpatient surveillance cultures would be low-pathogenicity gram positive bacteria which would lead to additional vancomycin therapy.
In summary, weekly outpatient SBCs collected from asymptomatic patients receiving high-dose steroids for the treatment of acute GvHD after HCT were found to be infrequently positive. The authors added that “surveillance blood cultures also led to excess antibiotic exposure and costs, suggesting benefits of such ambulatory screening may be of limited value in this setting.”
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