Garber A M
Department of Medicine, Stanford University School of Medicine, California 94305.
Biometrics. 1989 Sep;45(3):797-816.
Antibiotic use is thought to promote bacterial antibiotic resistance by selectively inhibiting the growth of sensitive strains. This study investigates the relation between antibiotic use and the propagation of antibiotic-resistant hospital-acquired infections due to gram-negative bacteria in a population of hospitalized patients. It treats infection spread and hospital mortality as a Markov process, in which the transition probabilities are logistic functions of a set of personal and hospital characteristics. Data from a university hospital are used to derive the parameters of the model.