Center for Biofilm Engineering
Abstract:
Repeatability and Reproducibility of Germicide Tests:
A Literature
Review"
99-003 The results of a quantitative antimicrobial assay can be
summarized by the log reduction value. For an assay to be proposed as a
standard method, it is usually necessary to conduct a collaborative study to
demonstrate that the repeatability and reproducibility standard deviations (SDs)
of the log reduction values are sufficiently small. It is not clear,
however, precisely how small those SDs should be. This paper describes the
results of a literature review conducted to determine the range of repeatability
and reproducibility SDs for standard quantitative antimicrobial assays.
The underlying premise is that, for an assay to have been accepted as a standard
method, its repeatability and reproducibility SDs must have been sufficiently
small. This premise implies that the repeatability and
reproducibility SDs of standard assays establish de facto guidelines for
acceptability. The survey comprised papers where the SDs could be
extracted directly or where they could be calculated from accessible data.
Papers describing suspension tests as well as hard surface tests were included.
For the standard antimicrobial assays reviewed, repeatability SDs ranged from
0.25 to 1.21 and the reproducibility SDs ranged from 0.31 to 1.54.
Tilt, N. and M.A. Hamilton, "Repeatability and Reproducibility of Germicide
Tests: A Literature Review," J. AOAC International, 82(2):384-389 (1999).
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