Does sterility testing of platelet concentrate prepared from deliberately infected blood donations?
Detection times for slow-growing bacteria are significantly shortened when PC samples are incubated at 35 degrees C: the numbers of bacteria in freshly prepared PCs may, however, be so low that the samples drawn for sterility testing do not contain a single bacterium. Our results do not support a shortening of the 24-hour or greater sampling time recommended by the manufacturers of established test systems, because also for consistent detection by FACS, bacteria need to grow in the PCs to sufficient numbers.
These findings may be used to pre-emptively identify colorectal surgery patients at increased risk of experiencing adverse outcomes.