Multilaboratory evaluation of an agar diffusion disk susceptibility test for rapidly growing anaerobic bacteria.

A multilaboratory collaborative study was undertaken to determine whether the anaerobic disk diffusion test of Horn et al. could be performed reproducibly and accurately. Tests with nine different antimicrobial disks were evaluated. Reproducibility of the agar diffusion disk method was similar to that of the reference agar dilution test procedure. The anaerobic disk diffusion procedure was found to be a potentially useful method for testing some antimicrobial agents against rapidly growing anaerobes belonging to the Bacteroides fragilis group. These promising results warrant further investigations and validations.