Streptococcus pneumoniae is the leading cause of bacterial pneumonia, meningitis, and otitis media in the United States. Since 1995, CDC has maintained a population-based surveillance system for S. pneumoniae as part of the Emerging Infections Program’s Active Bacterial Core Surveillance to collect information on the susceptibility patterns of all invasive strains of S. pneumoniae within the entire area of surveillance (population-based) instead of from selected hospitals only (sentinel surveillance). This report presents surveillance data for 1997, which indicated that the prevalence of S. pneumoniae that was not susceptible to penicillin varied among geographic regions and among hospitals within a geographic region.
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