Do Differential Time to Positive or Quantitative Blood Cultures Make a Difference?

In 2009, the IDSA published their guidelines for diagnosis and management of intravascular catheter infections. You preferentially will do that through two mechanisms: differential time to positivity or quantitative blood cultures. If you have more than three times as many colonies from the line culture as from the ventipuncture, again, that can strongly suggest that you may be dealing with a line as a source. And I would argue that if your patient has staph aureus in their blood, we should be thinking about catheters and trying to get them out as soon as possible.