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The Functional Resistance of Bacterial Biofilms

  • Chapter
Antimicrobial Drug Resistance

Part of the book series: Infectious Disease ((ID))

There is intellectual coherence when a physician must tell patients that the bacteria causing their infection have tested resistant to the empiric antibiotic therapy, and that an alternative drug must be used. In this chapter, we will concern ourselves with the growing number of bacterial infections in which antibiograms of the causative organism show sensitivity to standard antibiotics in readily attainable concentrations, but the infection fails to be cleared. This discrepancy is troubling and frustrating for patients, physicians, and diagnostic laboratories alike, but it can now be resolved by concepts that have become widely accepted in microbial ecology.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Division of Infectious Disease, University Hospital of Bern, Bern, Switzerland

    Christoph A. Fux

  2. Immunology & Microbiology, Singer Research Institute, Drexel University College of Medicine — Pittsburgh Campus, Allegheny General Hospital, Pittsburgh, PA

    Paul Stoodley

  3. Department of Biomedical Sciences, Dental School, University of Maryland — Baltimore, Baltimore, MD, USA

    Mark Shirtliff

  4. Department of Microbiology and Immunology, School of Medicine, University of Maryland — Baltimore, Baltimore, MD, USA

    Mark Shirtliff

  5. Center for Biofilms, School of Dentistry, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    J. William Costerton

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  3. Mark Shirtliff
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  4. J. William Costerton
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  1. Executive Vice President & Chief Medical Offi cer, Idenix Pharmaceuticals, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Douglas L. Mayers MD

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© 2009 Humana Press, a part of Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

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Fux, C.A., Stoodley, P., Shirtliff, M., Costerton, J.W. (2009). The Functional Resistance of Bacterial Biofilms. In: Mayers, D.L. (eds) Antimicrobial Drug Resistance. Infectious Disease. Humana Press. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-59745-180-2_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-59745-180-2_11

  • Publisher Name: Humana Press

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-60327-592-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-59745-180-2

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