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The advisability of diagnosing and treating asymptomatic bacteriuria (ASB) before various elective orthopedic procedures is controversial. Although some studies have shown that ASB is an independent risk factor for periprosthetic joint infection (PJI), presurgical antimicrobial therapy has not been seen to decrease its incidence.
These authors took a novel approach to address this issue at one orthopedic and arthritis center. By consensus, they removed routine culture of urine from the preoperative order set for elective joint arthroplasty (EJA) and prohibited their hospital microbiology laboratory from culturing preprocedure urine from patients with ASB. Surgeons could override this prohibition by informing the lab that the patient was symp…