Acolyte Biomedica Ltd, has announced the launch of the BacLite Rapid MRSA test. Salisbury District Hospital takes delivery of the first system at the end of May.

Giving same-day results, the BacLite Rapid MRSA test will allow hospitals to screen patients rapidly and enable infection control teams to act quickly to prevent a hospital acquired infection.

The final evaluation of the BacLite system at three UK laboratories including those at Barts & The London and Salisbury District NHS Trusts, showed the test can achieve in 5 hours what traditional microbiological methods take 2 days to deliver.

The test has the same performance as current culture based methods. In a multi centre trial of 1377 nasal swabs the sensitivity of the test was 93.4% and specificity was 95.8%. The study illustrates the confidence that medical staff could have when using BacLite Rapid MRSA test information for admitting patients; the probability that a negative result was correct (negative predictive value) was over 99%.

Data from a German study (Clin. Microb. Infect. 2005, 11 (6), 457-65) to be published in June reports that a properly implemented screening program can reduce MRSA by over 50%. The kind of rigorous surveillance they implemented is the backbone of the "Seek and Destroy" approach, so successfully used in the Netherlands.

In the UK and Ireland the combination of high bed occupancy and very infectious strains of the organism strongly suggests that traditional screening methods may be too slow for maximum effect. The use of rapid testing methods is becoming increasingly part of the range of measures by which some UK hospitals face the MRSA challenge.