From year to year, it is important to get an overview of the occurrence of causative agents in febrile neutropenic patients to determine the empiric treatment. Thus our aims were to evaluate a four-year period regarding the prevalence of bloodstream infections and the most important causative agents. During this period, 1,361 patients were treated in our hematology ward because of various hematological disorders. 812 febrile episodes were recorded in 469 patients. At that time, 3,714 blood culture (BC) bottles were sent for microbiological investigations, 759 of them gave positive signal. From the majority of positive blood culture bottles (67.1%), Gram-positive bacteria, mainly coagulase-negative staphylococci (CNS), were grown. Gram-negative bacteria were isolated from 32.9% of the positive blood culture bottles, in these cases the leading pathogen was Escherichia coli. The high prevalence of CNS was attributed to mainly contamination, while lower positivity rate for Gram-negative bacteria was associated with the use of broad-spectrum empiric antibiotic treatment.
Keywords: blood culture; hematology; malignancy; neutropenia; sepsis.