Forty isolates of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus were tested versus oxacillin at 30 and 35°C with and without 2% NaCl supplementation of Mueller-Hinton broth and classified as having resistance that was low (MIC,.16 ,ug/ml) or high (MIC, .32 gug/ml) and temperature or NaCl dependent. Only three isolates had low-grade resistance at both 30 and 35°C; for two isolates the MICs at 35°C were 24x the MICs at 30°C. NaCl usually increased the MICs two-to fourfold. Efficiency of plating studies were performed on strains selected for their level of oxacillin resistance and according to temperature-related difference in MICs. Most strains appeared to represent the heterogeneous resistance phenotype. Cefamandole MICs were little affected by temperature but increased with NaCl. With three exceptions, cefamandole MBCs were c4x MICs. For only six isolates were cefuroxime MICs <16 ,ug/ml. Four strains that were susceptible to both cefuroxime and cefamandole were selected for time-killing curve studies at inocula of 107 CFU/ml. At 8x MIC, cefuroxime failed to reduce the concentration of any strain by .3 x loglo CFU/ml. Killing of .3 x loglo CFU/ml was achieved by cefamandole at 4x and 8x MIC in one strain, at 8x MIC only in two strains, and by neither 4x nor 8x MIC in one strain. Within therapeutically attainable blood levels, cefuroxime is essentially inactive and cefamandole is variably bactericidal against oxacillin-resistant S. aureus.Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus should be considered resistant to P-lactam antibiotics, including all members of the cephalosporin group, according to the guidelines for antimicrobial susceptibility testing from the National Committee for Clinical Laboratory Standards (17). Some studies, however, have shown that cefamandole has good activity in vitro against both methicillin-resistant S. aureus and Staphylococcus epidermidis (7,16,20,29), although there seems to be inconsistent activity when cefamandole has been used for experimentally induced infections with methicillin-resistant S. aureus or when it has been used in clinical trials (4,6,8,11 , 1987). Discrepancies in results of treatment of staphylococcal infections with cefamandole could be due to the well-known heteroresistance found in methicillin-resistant S. aureus as well as to differences in susceptibility testing methodology, inoculum size, temperature of incubation, supplementation of culture medium with NaCl, and use of broth micro-versus macrodilution techniques (2,3,5,12,15,27).Hartman and Tomasz recently identified three different phenotypes of methicillin-resistant S. aureus: homogeneous resistance, heterogeneous resistance, and thermosensitive heterogeneous resistance (10). In the homogeneous resis-* Corresponding author. t Present address: Division of Infectious Diseases, Jackson Memorial Hospital, Miami, FL 33136. tance phenotype, methicillin resistance was expressed in approximately 100% of the cells present. In a second phenotype, the expression of resistance was heterogeneous and was not alter...