Abstract
ObjectiveTo determine bacterial contaminants and their antimicrobial susceptibility patterns from medical equipment and inanimate surfaces.ResultsOf 130 swabs, 115 (88.5%) swabs were culture positive, of which contaminated medical equipment and inanimate surfaces account 70 (83.3%) and 45 (97.8%), respectively. All the swabs collected from sphygmomanometer, bedside table, computer and computer standing tables were 100% contaminated with bacteria. From the culture-positive swabs, a total of 171 bacterial isolates were identified, out of which 117 (68.4%) and 54 (31.6%) isolates were gram-positive and gram-negative, respectively. Most isolates (82%) were resistant to ampicillin and 13%, 8.6%, and 14% was observed in ciprofloxacin, gentamicin, and tetracycline respectively. Multi-drug resistant was observed in Escherichia coli (72.7%) and Staphylococcus aureus (58.7%).
Highlights
Intensive care unit (ICU) acquired infections are global public health concern [1]
Bacterial contamination of the medical equipment and inanimate surfaces used in the ICU put ICU admitted patients at higher risk for hospital-acquired infection
Studies have reported that contaminated medical equipment and inanimate surfaces were highly associated with ICU acquired infections [11–16]
Summary
A total of 130 swabs (84 from medical equipment and 46 from inanimate surfaces) were collected and inoculated to culture media and all the specimens were analysed. Bacterial contamination of computer in this study was in-line with the studies conducted in Ethiopia [36], Egypt [37], and Pakistan [38] and higher than from sub-Saharan Africa [39] and Germany [40] This might be attributed to the number of user’s and prolong the survival time of bacteria on plastic surfaces [39, 40], and the proximity of the equipment or surface to the patient [29, 35], the differences in sample size and method [16, 17]. With regard to the antimicrobial susceptibility pattern of the isolated bacteria to commonly prescribed antibiotics in our study area, the resistance of CoNS to erythromycin and penicillin G was higher than the studies conducted from Ethiopia [17, 19, 36], but lower than a study from sub-Saharan Africa [34]. The inconsistent drug-resistant and multidrug-resistant patterns observed might be due to variations in geographic areas, hospital environmental conditions, inappropriate administration of antimicrobial drugs, self-medication practice [17, 22, 23, 26, 32, 34, 36]
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