Working for public and animal health

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Antimicrobials

VLA is able to provide up-to-date profiles for a wide range of currently marketed or research antimicrobials.

We can carry out comparative studies between different antimicrobials and changes in resistance profile over time. These may be suitable for product registrations, claim extensions or used for marketing purposes.

VLA tests are performed under ISO 17025. This ensures your data is of the highest standard of quality, impartiality and credibility for your customers and regulatory authorities.

To support these services VLA maintains over 29,000 recent and historic bacterial isolates of large animal pathogens. The extensive collection includes both common and less common anaerobes from all livestock species.

VLA has centres of expertise dedicated to antimicrobial testing, and anaerobic work. Our techniques are continuously updated to ensure they are in keeping with advances in the human field as well as veterinary specialisation.

We routinely offer several minimum inhibition concentration (MIC) assays. These conform to British Society for Antimicrobial Chemotherapy (BASC) or Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute (CLSI) standards.

• Agar plate and broth dilution MICs
• Disc diffusion sensitivity by zone size
• Sensititre MIC
• Breakpoint MIC
• E-Test MIC

We can quote for other methodologies according to your needs.

Our collection represents typical and atypical isolates from respiratory, enteric, mastitic and other diseases.

From 2000 we have collected over 15,000 isolates including:

• over 500 Pasturella multocida strains
• over 4,500 E.coli
• over 1,000 Salmonella spp
• more than 1500 common mastitis pathogens

Many of these isolates already have established sensitivity profiles, so we can selectively test organisms of known provenance. We can also offer collections of recent isolates to meet your requirements.

In addition we have over 1,500 anaerobes of 15 genera identified to species level. These include:

• Brachyspiras
• Clostridia
• Fusobacteria
• Bacteriodes spp.

We can collect isolates to your requirements if you have a specific need not covered by the current collection.