摘要：Australia currently has no system of passive surveillance of antimicrobial resistance in spite of the importance of surveillance in identifying and defi ning emergent resistance being generally accepted. Queensland Health Pathology and Scientifi c Services have developed . exible software for passive sur-veillance with the capacity to handle national data. The system imports raw data strings in delimited ASCII text format into a relational database and screens to exclude duplicates before the processing of the cumulative susceptibility data. It allows considerable . exibility in inquiry parameters and has the ability to 'drill down' to individual laboratory results. Examples of analytical output are given for 49,169 unique isolate results obtained in all Queensland Health Pathology Service laboratories from 1 January to 30 June 2003. The system could form the basis of a national system for passive antimicro-bial resistance surveillance
