Noha A Hassuna, Amany Hosney Ibrahim Mohamed, Sahar Mohamed Abo-Eleuoon,Hazem Abdel-Wahab A. Rizk
Background: Pseudomonas aeruginosa is a very common cause of health care acquired infection and represents a major threat to critically ill patients particularly burn patients. The emergence of multidrug resistant strains is up surging leading to problematic control. Thus we aimed in this study to investigate the resistance profiles of P. aeruginosa, the frequency of ESBL and the presence of integron class 1.
Methods and Findings: Pus samples from 250 children were collected and screened by culture on suitable media for isolation of P. aeruginosa that were identified by culture characteristics, Gram stain, and biochemical reactions. The susceptibility of the isolates to commonly used antibiotics in pediatric cases was performed using the disc diffusion method. ESBL detection was performed phenotypically by double disc method in addition to detection of blaTEM and blaSHV genes by PCR. Class 1 integron was amplified by real time PCR. A total of 50 (20%) of the isolates were identified as P. aeruginosa. The mean age was 9.2±3.5, with higher rate of isolation among females (70%) and in children below 10 years (62%). High resistance to ceftazidime (86%), and cefotaxime (72%) was observed. No resistance was found to imipenem. Twenty-eight isolates (56%) were multidrug resistant and 71.4% of them had integron class 1. ESBL was detected in 51% of the ceftazidime resistant strains of which only 12.5% harbored blaTEM gene and none had blaSHV gene.
Conclusion: High frequency of integron class 1 is a possible reason for dissemination of antibiotic resistance in the pediatric burn unit in Minia governorate. Limitations: CTX-M was not tested for due to very limited resources as well as integron class 1 sequencing.
