Geographic variation in drug susceptibility among iso-lates of Streptococcus pneumoniae has influenced nation-al treatment guidelines for community-acquired pneumo-nia. Whether individual hospital susceptibility data providereliable and valid information for providers is unclear. Weexamined the geographic and temporal variability in hospi-tal-reported rates of pneumococcal susceptibility. We sur-veyed all 52 hospitals that provided acute adult care in thefive counties surrounding Philadelphia and collected dataon levels of penicillin susceptibility among all pneumococ-cal blood isolates from 1998 to 2000. In 1998, pneumococ-cal nonsusceptibility to penicillin varied from 0% to 67% ofall blood isolates across the 33 hospitals with >10 isolatesin that year. Hospital location did not correlate with the levelof reported pneumococcal susceptibility (p = 0.8). In addi-tion, correlations were not significant in reported pneumo-coccal susceptibility to penicillin within individual hospitalsduring the 3 years
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