BackgroundStudies frequently use nasal swabs to determine Staphylococcus aureus carriage. Self-sampling would be extremely useful in an outhospital research situation, but has not been studied in a healthy population. We studied the similarity of self-samples and investigator-samples in nares and pharynxes of healthy study subjects (hospital staff) in the Netherlands.MethodsOne hundred and five nursing personnel members were sampled 4 times in random order after viewing an instruction paper: 1) nasal self-sample, 2) pharyngeal self-sample, 3) nasal investigator-sample, and 4) pharyngeal investigator-sample.ResultsFor nasal samples, agreement is 93% with a kappa coefficient of 0.85 (95% CI 0.74-0.96), indicating excellent agreement, for pharyngeal samples agreement is 83% and the kappa coefficient is 0.60 (95% CI 0.43-0.76), indicating good agreement. In both sampling sites self-samples even detected more S. aureus than investigator-samples.ConclusionsThis means that self-samples are appropriate for detection of Staphylococcus aureus and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus.

Oxoid Brilliance MRSA Agar and bioMé rieux MRSA ID medium were evaluated for their ability to identify meticillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) in clinical samples. Nasal and throat samples (n5629) were taken from veterinarians and their household members. The sensitivities of Brilliance MRSA Agar and MRSA ID medium after 20 h of incubation were 63.6 and 64.5 %, and the specificities were 94.1 and 99.4 %, respectively. After an enrichment step, the sensitivities increased to 96.3 and 97.2 %, but the specificities decreased to 88.7 and 98.5 %, respectively. Brilliance MRSA Agar and MRSA ID medium are both sensitive methods for the screening of MRSA in combination with broth enrichment, but positive results require confirmation.