Laboratory Reporting
As the international database of bacterial species continues to
grow very rapidly, laboratory directors and microbiologists will be
hard pressed to determine when to implement taxonomic changes
in current test reports (22). Table 3 presents some suggestions on
how to approach this increasingly vexing problem. One also needs
to be mindful that many taxa now reported as only being associated
with the environment may be found to cause human illness in
the future (a good example is Shewanella haliotis [23]), which means
that clinical microbiologists must stay alert to taxonomic revisions
at all times.