Antimicrobial treatment of allograft valves

Abstract

The introduction by Barratt-Boyes and Roche¹ of fresh allograft valves for valve replacement used an antibiotic mixture as an alternative antimicrobial treatment to the chemical sterilization with ethylene oxide described by Longmore et al.². That antibiotic mixture was not satisfactory in this hospital and Lockey et al.³ described another mixture, ‘B’. This was changed to mixture ‘C’ in 1974 after extensive work by Waterworth et al.⁴. However, mixture ‘C’ was found to be unsuitable because of the occurrence of resistant Pseudomonas spp. and of Candida spp. and it was changed in 1975 to the mixture described by Yacoub et al.⁵. This was changed again in 1976 to include nystatin as the antifungal agent instead of amphotericin B.