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Objectives. To determine the incidence of Ureaplasma urealyticum (UU) and Ureaplasma parvum (UP) in symptomatic and asymptomatic women of reproductive age and to estimate antibiotic susceptibility of ureaplasma isolates.Material and methods. This study included 424 ureaplasma positive women of 1370 tested women who visited gynecological practices during 2010. Cervicovaginal or urethral swab specimens from each patient were obtained for cultivation and molecular typing by RT-PCR.Results. Ureaplasma spp. was identified by cultivation in 424 (34.4%) cases, of which 79.0%were from women with symptoms and 21.0% from women without symptoms. Among ureaplasma positive women, 121 (28.5%) were pregnant. Genotyping was successful in 244 strains, and the majority of samples were identified as UP (92.6%). Among genotyped isolates, there were 79.5% from symptomatic and 20.5% from asymptomatic women; 29.9% from pregnant and 70.1% from non-pregnant women. There was no difference in the incidence of ureaplasma type regarding symptoms. Antibiotic susceptibility of 424 ureaplasma isolates identified by cultivation showed that all strains were susceptible to doxycycline, josamycin, erythromycin, tetracycline, clarithromycin and pristinamicin, but there was lower susceptibility to quinolone antibiotics, i.e. 42.9% and 24.5% isolates were susceptible to ofloxacin and ciprofloxacin, respectively.Conclusion. This study shows that UP was the most frequent isolated ureaplasma species (92.6%). Regarding antibiotic susceptibility, quinolones are not the best choice for treatment of ureaplasma infections, while macrolides and tetracyclines are still effective.

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BackgroundConfidence in any diagnostic and antimicrobial susceptibility testing data is provided by appropriate and regular quality assurance (QA) procedures. In Europe, the European Gonococcal Antimicrobial Susceptibility Programme (Euro-GASP) has been monitoring the antimicrobial susceptibility in Neisseria gonorrhoeae since 2004. Euro-GASP includes an external quality assessment (EQA) scheme as an essential component for a quality-assured laboratory-based surveillance programme. Participation in the EQA scheme enables any problems with the performed antimicrobial susceptibility testing to be identified and addressed, feeds into the curricula of laboratory training organised by the Euro-GASP network, and assesses the capacity of individual laboratories to detect emerging new, rare and increasing antimicrobial resistance phenotypes. Participant performance in the Euro-GASP EQA scheme over a 10 year period (2007 to 2016, no EQA in 2013) was evaluated.MethodsAntimicrobial susceptibility category and MIC results from the first 5 years (2007–2011) of the Euro-GASP EQA were compared with the latter 5 years (2012–2016). These time periods were selected to assess the impact of the 2012 European Union case definitions for the reporting of antimicrobial susceptibility.ResultsAntimicrobial susceptibility category agreement in each year was ≥91%. Discrepancies in susceptibility categories were generally because the MICs for EQA panel isolates were on or very close to the susceptibility or resistance breakpoints. A high proportion of isolates tested over the 10 years were within one (≥90%) or two (≥97%) MIC log2 dilutions of the modal MIC, respectively. The most common method used was Etest on GC agar base. There was a shift to using breakpoints published by the European Committee on Antimicrobial Susceptibility Testing (EUCAST) in the latter 5 years, however overall impact on the validity of results was limited, as the percentage categorical agreement and MIC concordance changed very little between the two five-year periods.ConclusionsThe high level of comparability of results in this EQA scheme indicates that high quality data are produced by the Euro-GASP participants and gives confidence in susceptibility and resistance data generated by laboratories performing decentralised testing.