AVC Diagnostic Services and AVC Infection Prevention and Control have recently created cumulative antibiograms for common pathogens isolated from canine, feline, equine, and bovine clinical samples submitted to the laboratory from practices in Atlantic Canada.
Appropriate antimicrobial selection should consider the target pathogen(s) and their antimicrobial susceptibility profiles. When culture and antimicrobial susceptibility test results are not available for an individual patient, cumulative antibiogram data can be used to help guide antimicrobial therapy decisions. A cumulative antibiogram (often referred to simply as an “antibiogram”) is a report that summarizes the susceptibility of local bacterial isolates to different antimicrobials over a defined period (e.g., multiple years). It is a table that shows the percentage of isolates within a bacterial species that are susceptible to the various antimicrobials tested by the laboratory, helping clinicians choose the most effective empiric therapy based on local laboratory data. Antibiograms are not a substitute for performing culture and antimicrobial susceptibility testing on a patient, but they can be useful when results are pending or otherwise unavailable.