COVID-19 / Coronavirus Outbreak: How to take blood cultures

Dear colleagues, in order to obtain appropriate blood cultures, ideally, two blood culture sets should be utilized. Each set consists of a bottle of aerobic and anaerobic bacteria and fungus. Additionally, two sterile needles and two syringes will be required.

Each of the syringes used here contains 24 milliliters of sterile blood obtained by vascular puncture. 8 milliliters of blood are injected into each bottle. One syringe is sufficient for a set.

The colored bottle top caps can be disposed of. The uncovered bottle top is sterile and should not be touched. The bottle tops may be disinfected with alcohol-containing disinfectant to ensure sterility.

No air should be injected into the blood culture bottles. Importantly, in order to reduce contamination of the anaerobic blood culture bottle, this should be filled as second. The needle must be attached to the syringe using aseptic technique.

The fungus culture bottle must be filled first. When the needle penetrates the membrane, ensure that the needle does not have direct contact with the disinfectant as there is a risk that the contained blood could be contaminated, in turn, killing any pathogens. The fungus blood culture bottle is filled with 8 milliliters of blood.

This bottle is now prepared. The anaerobic blood culture bottle must now be filled using the same procedure as before. The membrane is penetrated and 8 milliliters of blood injected.

The bottle is twisted once so that the contents are adequately mixed, and then placed to one side. The final 8 milliliters of blood are injected into the aerobic bacteria culture bottle. The first set is now complete.

The same procedure applies when preparing and utilizing the second set. Now it is important to label the sets of blood cultures appropriately. One complete set followed by the next.

Which bottle is involved? In this case, the aerobic bacteria bottle. Then the sample site, in this case, a Shaldon catheter.

One label per bottle is required, or a total of six labels. The transport bag is marked. Each set of cultures is placed in an individual transport bag.

The samples are packed and sent on to the microbiology laboratory. With COVID-19 patients, the transport bags should be marked explicitly so as to make all colleagues aware. Thank you very much.