Colorex Staph aureus

Focus on Staph aureus

Staphylococcus aureus is a major pathogenic bacterium found in clinical specimens and in food industry products. Staph. aureus is a commensal human germ (50% of the population hosting S.aureus) but can be an opportunistic agent due to its pyogenic and toxinogenic behaviour. It represents a major public health problem.

Medium Performance

** Clinical Field **

1. Easy to read: compared to Blood Agar, Colorex Staph aureus allows easy differentiation of mauve from blue or white colonies and is of considerable help in identifying suspect colonies.

2. Higher sensitivity (exceeds 99%*) than Blood Agar, especially in specimens heavily loaded with gram negative flora competing with and inhibiting S.aureus.

3. Better selectivity and sensitivity compared to the conventional media, Mannitol Salt Agar (called Chapman Agar in Europe), which is showing an excessive rate of false positives and of false negatives.

4. Lower workload: Blood Agar, another conventional medium for detecting Staphylococcus aureus, requires tedious and costly examination with immunological tests of 5-10 colonies per suspected sample. With Colorex Staph aureus, testing a single colony with typical colour for further identification will generally be sufficient for high probability detection of Staphylococcus aureus.

 **Industrial Field **

1. Easy to prepare: The conventional medium for S.aureus is the Baird-Parker which has to be supplemented with RPF (Rabbit Plasma Fibrinogen), rendering the plate manufacturing delicate and complex, and also reducing the shelf life of the poured plates to a couple of weeks. On the contrary, Colorex Staph aureus comes with all the compounds already in the agar (no need of any supplement).

2. Fast: The results on Baird Parker have to be read after 48h of incubation while with Colorex Staph aureus the results are available after only 24 h.