European Journal of Cardiovascular Medicine

Carbapenems are an important class of antibiotics that are fairly active against a wide range of Gram-negative bacteria. However, the organisms that can produce beta-lactamases that hydrolyze carbapenems has posed a danger to the clinical utility of this class of antibiotics. Materials and Methods: This study reports the Simplified carbapenem inactivation method to detect carbapenemase-producing gram negative bacilli in a simple and accurate manner. This method is based on Modified Carbapenem inactivation method with the improvement of experimental procedure. Instead of incubating the antibiotic disc in the organism culture media, the organism to be tested and smeared directly onto the antibiotic disk in the sCIM. Results:  The simplified Carbapenem Inactivation method could detect 42 isolates as carbapenem producing Enterobacteriaceae of the 63 isolates and 11 isolates of Pseudomonas aeruginosa of the 27 isolates and in complete agreement with the standard method described by the CLSI. Conclusion: The simplified Carbapenem Inactivation method is suitable for routine use in most clinical microbiology labs for detection of carbapenemase-producing gram negative bacilli.