The Postantibiotic Effect

Excerpt

Suppression of bacterial growth that persists after short exposure of organisms to antimicrobial agents has been seen since early investigations with penicillin. For example, Parker and Luse (1) showed in 1948 that staphylococci exposed to penicillin G for 20 minutes and then transferred to drug-free broth did not resume normal growth for 1 to 3 hours. These findings were applied to studies with antituberculous drugs (2), but not until the past decade were they extended to antimicrobial drugs developed after penicillin and to gram-negative bacilli (3, 4). The term postantibiotic effect has been used to describe this phenomenon because it