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Viability of meticillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus after long-term storage on Dorset egg medium.

Meticillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) has emerged over the past decade as a significant bacterial pathogen associated with healthcare-associated infection (Otter & French, 2011). For this reason, it is important that clinical microbiology laboratories archive representative isolates for historical purposes, as well as for longitudinal studies, where such isolates may be required within the short, medium and long terms. Many clinical laboratories in the UK have traditionally used Dorset egg medium (DEM) as the storage medium of choice for the maintenance of their MRSA isolates. To date, there have been no reports in the literature detailing the fate of MRSA viability under storage conditions of MRSA isolates in DEM. Therefore, it was the aim of this study to determine the survival of clinical MRSA isolates in the medium to long terms (post 8–9 years of storage). Such survival data will be of interest to biomedical scientists with responsibility for their hospital MRSA collections, as well as to clinical microbiologists and curators of bacterial culture collections, so that they are aware of the survival dynamics of these organisms under such storage conditions.