Abstract
The presence of microorganisms in pharmaceuticals is undesirable because they may cause spoilage of the product and may present an infection hazard to the consumers or patients. A total of 102 samples of oral and topical non-sterile pharmaceutical products were collected at random from different drug houses and pharmacies in Iraq, to investigate the microbial contamination of these products. Bacterial isolates recovered from these medicaments were subjected to susceptibility testing against various antibiotics by disk diffusion method according to Clinical and Laboratory Standards (CLSI) guidelines. The results revealed that the occurrence of gram-positive bacteria was in oral and topical medicaments while gram-negative bacteria were only detected in topical medicaments. More than 58% of Bacillus isolates were resistant to lincomycin and Bacillus mycoides isolates were resistant to beta-lactam antibiotics and trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole. Staphylococcus spp. showed a relatively high resistance to ampicillin, amoxicillin, penicillin, tetracycline, and trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole. S. epidermidis had the highest number of multi-resistant isolates. Furthermore, 87.5% of isolated gram-negative rods showed high resistance to beta-lactam antibiotics and 75% of them were highly resistant to erythromycin. One isolate of Pseudomonas aeruginosa was the most resistant among all gram-negative rod isolates. The high rate of resistance to antimicrobial agents of bacterial isolates recovered from oral and topical medicaments in this study may indicate a widespread antibiotic resistance among bacteria isolated from different sources, including those of anthropological and environmental origin.
Highlights
The presence of microorganisms in pharmaceuticals is undesirable because they may cause spoilage of the product and may present an infection hazard to the consumers or patients
The aim of this study was to investigate the microbial contamination of some non-sterile pharmaceuticals present in Iraq and study the susceptibility to selected antibiotics of bacterial isolates recovered from these medicaments
The results of this study showed that Bacillus species were the bacteria most frequently found in orally and topically administrated medicaments, and this observation agrees with the work of other investigators [1,2]
Summary
The presence of microorganisms in pharmaceuticals is undesirable because they may cause spoilage of the product and may present an infection hazard to the consumers or patients. 87.5% of isolated Gram-negative rods showed high resistance to betalactam antibiotics and 75% of them were highly resistant to erythromycin. Conclusion: The high rate of resistance to antimicrobial agents of bacterial isolates recovered from oral and topical medicaments in this study may indicate a widespread antibiotic resistance among bacteria isolated from different sources, including those of anthropological and environmental origin. The number of bacterial strains capable of causing infections is increasing; many of them are resistant to one or more of the antibiotics used in therapy and this resistance constitutes an increasingly serious threat to the current antimicrobial agents’ therapy [9]. A number of genes may be inserted into a given integron, resulting in resistance to multiple antimicrobial drugs [11]
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