[Bacteriology and intensive care].
The intensive care units (ICU) constitute one of the sectors of the hospital with the highest incidence of infections. Part of the patients admitted to the ICU are carrier of an, often serious, infection which justified their admission. But more important are of infections contracted in the course of hospitalization. These are particularly frequent because of the principal factors which govern the emergence of nosocomial infections are present in the ICU in a very evident way. The frequency of infections which are essentially of the nosocomial type, compels the microbiology laboratory to adapt certain attitudes in the performance as well as in the interpretation of bacteriological analyses. The following points have to be dressed: the "colonisation" of various sites by potentially pathogenic bacteria should obviously be interpreted correctly; a systemic supervision sampling has become current in the ICU; the organization of the laboratory must allow a correlation of the results obtained from different samples; the laboratory must be accustomed to the bacterial ecology of the hospital and more specifically to this of the ICU; as the risk of nosocomial infections in the ICU is quite high, hospital hygiene and supervision of hospital strains are directly involved.