| Summary: | <p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Studies frequently use nasal swabs to determine <it>Staphylococcus aureus</it> carriage. Self-sampling would be extremely useful in an outhospital research situation, but has not been studied in a healthy population. We studied the similarity of self-samples and investigator-samples in nares and pharynxes of healthy study subjects (hospital staff) in the Netherlands.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>One hundred and five nursing personnel members were sampled 4 times in random order after viewing an instruction paper: 1) nasal self-sample, 2) pharyngeal self-sample, 3) nasal investigator-sample, and 4) pharyngeal investigator-sample.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>For nasal samples, agreement is 93% with a kappa coefficient of 0.85 (95% CI 0.74-0.96), indicating excellent agreement, for pharyngeal samples agreement is 83% and the kappa coefficient is 0.60 (95% CI 0.43-0.76), indicating good agreement. In both sampling sites self-samples even detected more <it>S. aureus</it> than investigator-samples.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>This means that self-samples are appropriate for detection of <it>Staphylococcus aureus</it> and methicillin-resistant <it>Staphylococcus aureus</it>.</p>
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