Prevalence of multidrug resistant bacteria in Egyptian hospitalized patients

The growth and spread of pathogenic bacteria resistant to commercial antibiotics is one of the biggest issues facing the world today. The aim of this study was to investigate the rates of antibiotic resistance bacteria that cause infections as well as the prevalence and characteristics of antibiotic prescriptions among hospitalized patients. A total of 330 clinical samples including sputum, blood, pus, wound, and urine were collected from hospitalized female and male patients aged 9 to 82 years. Two hundred pathogenic bacteria were isolated and identified from patients and subjected to antibiotic susceptibility testing. Gram-negative bacteria were much more prevalent than Gram-positive bacteria. The most common bacteria were Klebsiella pneumonia and Staphylococcus aureus. The Gram-negative and Gram-positive isolates were mainly resistant to amikacin, amoxicillin/clavulanic acid, cefazolin, cefaclor, ciprofloxacin, ceftazidime, cefotaxime, cefepime, gentamicin, levofloxacin, ofloxacin, imipenem, meropenem, doxycycline, and tetracycline. Among the 15 antibiotics, most isolated strains were carbapenem-sensitive. All strains were found to be multi-drug resistant (MDR) bacteria. Therefore, these two strains were identified using 16SrRNA sequencing and registered in the GenBank database with accession numbers, CP 072555.1 and MW 453042.1. It could be concluded that MDR bacteria, both Gram-positive and Gram-negative, are common among hospital patients. All of the identified strains were MDR, however they were carbapenem-sensitive. The most common bacteria were Staphylococcus aureus and Klebsiella pneumonia. These results emphasize the need to search for contemporary antibiotics to combat these antibiotic-resistant microorganisms.