Infective Endocarditis in the Antibiotic Era

Negative Blood CulturesAmong the factors that may be responsible for failure to recover organisms from the circulation of some patients with infective endocarditis are the use of antibiotics in etiologically undefined febrile illnesses, right-sided endocarditis, prolonged duration of SBE ("bacteria-free" state), presence of renal disease and errors in the technics of obtaining and culturing blood.2 It is difficult to determine if the proportion of recently reported groups of cases in which bacteria could not be recovered from the blood is larger than that described in the older literature since the factors listed above are often not detailed. In addition, . . .