Intra-operative antibiotic bead maker--point of technique.

Chronic osteomyelitis is a disease of soft tissue and bone and it is common in the developing countries. The management of this debilitating disease requires the delivery of the appropriate chemotherapeutic agent at the site of the infection after adequate debridement. The search for a suitable carrier for these chemotherapeutic agents is the advent of the 'septopal' or gentamycin-polymethylmethacrylate (gentamycin-PMMA) beads. Septopal beads are expensive and are not affordable by patients in the developing countries. Moreover, most of the micro-organisms (mixed flora) responsible for chronic osteomyelitis in our hospitals are sensitive to ceftriaxone and only in a few cases were gentamycin-sensitive micro-organisms isolated. Therefore, it was imperative that patient-specific and antibiotic-specific PMMA beads would be the way forward and this is the reasoning behind the production of the intra-operative antibiotic bead maker (IABM) and the point of technique is hereby presented.

Comparative in-vitro antibacterial activity of two brands of antibiotics against clinical isolates of some bacterial genera.

Six brands of ampicillin and four of gentamicin were compared for their in-vitro antibacterial activity against clinical isolates of Escherichia coli, Staphylococcus aureus and Pseudomonas aeruginosa. The minimum inhibitory concentrations obtained for each brand against each bacterial isolate compared very well with one another, and the kinetics of bactericidal activity showed that the brands of each antibiotic possessed similar activity against the clinical isolates tested.