Legionella infections have steadily increased in the United States over the last 20 years, and most of these infections have been attributed to contaminated water. The gold standard for confirmation of Legionella presence in water is culturing with Buffered Charcoal Yeast Extract (BCYE) agar. Following many modifications, this method is still time-consuming, expensive, and can take longer than 10 days for full confirmation. The Legiolert is a newer and simpler culture product that is claimed to be able to quantify Legionella pneumophila in 7 days with high sensitivity and specificity and does not need further confirmation for the presence of L. pneumophila. This study compared the culturability of L. pneumophila occurring in a simulated home plumbing system using both Legiolert and BCYE agar methods. Out of 185 water samples, Legiolert and BCYE method detected L. pneumophila in 83 and 85% of the samples, respectively. The two methods were determined to be statistically equivalent for culturability of L. pneumophila, though the detected levels by Legiolert were slightly higher than the BCYE method. The molecular confirmation of positive (n = 254) and negative wells (n = 82) with Legiolert also showed a high specificity of 96.5% (i.e., 3.5% false positives (9/254) and 0% false negatives (0/82)).

在过去的 20 年里，美国的军团菌感染稳步增加，其中大部分感染归因于受污染的水。确认水中军团菌存在的金标准是用缓冲木炭酵母提取物 (BCYE) 琼脂培养。经过多次修改，这种方法仍然耗时、昂贵，并且可能需要 10 天以上才能完全确认。Legiolert 是一种更新、更简单的培养产品，据称能够在 7 天内以高灵敏度和特异性对嗜肺军团菌进行定量，并且不需要进一步确认嗜肺军团菌的存在。本研究比较了L. pneumophila的可培养性在使用 Legiolert 和 BCYE 琼脂方法的模拟家庭管道系统中发生。在 185 个水样中，Legiolert 和 BCYE 方法分别在 83% 和 85% 的样本中检测到嗜肺军团菌。尽管 Legiolert 检测到的水平略高于 BCYE 方法，但两种方法被确定为在统计上对嗜肺军团菌的可培养性相当。Legiolert对阳性 ( n = 254) 和阴性孔 ( n = 82) 的分子确认也显示出 96.5% 的高特异性（即 3.5% 假阳性 (9/254) 和 0% 假阴性 (0/82) ）。