BRCAST ESTABLISHES INTERPRETATION RULES FOR AST

The Ministry of Health published the Ordinance No. 64, of December 11, 2018, which determines the use of interpretation rules for antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST) in the country’s public and private laboratories, based on the Brazilian version of the European Committee on Antimicrobial Susceptibility Testing documents (EUCAST/BrCAST version).

The legislation was drafted considering:

• the need for standardization of antimicrobial susceptibility tests interpretation in clinical and research laboratories;
• the need to strengthen the laboratory network, making it essential to implement instruments for tests standardization to determine sensitivity profiles;
• the improvement of the quality of the results of in vitro antimicrobial susceptibility tests for better epidemiological and clinical surveillance;
• the need to properly guide the prescription of drugs, as well as prevention and control measures to prevent the spread of infectious diseases; and
• the resolutions of the members of the Working Group for the Analysis of Methodologies for Sensitivity Tests used in Microbiology Laboratories (GT-TSA).

The deadline for the laboratories to conform to the BrCAST methodology is twelve (12) months, counted from the date of publication of the Ordinance in the Government’s Official Newspaper ­– D.O.U. (12/14/2018).

The documents are available for free download here.