Enumerating Antibiotic Susceptibility Patterns of Pseudomonas aeruginosa Isolated from Different Sources in Dhaka City

BACKGROUND: Pseudomonas aeruginosa is a ubiquitous free-living bacterium and is responsible for severe nosocomial infections, life-threatening infections in immune compromised persons. The bacterium, along with its natural resistance, can acquire resistance to many antibiotics by a variety of methods. METHOD: Therefore, to compare the antibiotic sensitivity pattern of Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a total of seventeen isolates of P. aeruginosa were isolated from different sources; for example environmental sources, frozen food sources, clinical sources and medical waste materials. Isolates were confirmed to be P. aeruginosa by cultural and biochemical properties. RESULT: The isolates were tested against seventeen commercially available antibiotics to observe the antibiotic susceptibility patterns. Imipenem and meropenem were the most potent antibiotics (100% sensitivity) followed by amikacin and piperacillin with maximum sensitivity. Among others, gentamicin, ciprofloxacin, levofloxacin and aztreonam were found to be fairly active. A good number of isolates were intermediately resistant to ceftriaxone. The rates of resistance to aztreonam, cefotaxime and ceftazidime were 11.76%, 82.35% and 5.88% respectively. Complete resistance was observed against penicillin, ampicillin, cefixime and cefpodoxime. CONCLUSION: It can be concluded that the clinical isolates including isolate from medical waste, were multi-drug resistant than environmental and food isolates indicating the risk of transmission of resistance to the environmental isolates of P. aeruginosa.