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Objective: Blood cultures are essential for the diagnosis of bloodstream infections; however, they carry a risk of both low yield and culturing skin contaminants. The optimal culturing threshold which results in a high sensitivity of detecting bacteremia yet has a low contamination rate is not well defined. We sought to analyze the blood culture sampling practices, rates and results among patients admitted under internal medicine.
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Friedman et al. (2017) studied this question.
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