TITLE:
Surveillance for Antibiotic Resistance in Clostridium difficile Strains Isolated from Patients in a Tertiary Care Center
AUTHORS:
Meenakshi Singh, Chetana Vaishnavi, Safrun Mahmood, Rakesh Kochhar
KEYWORDS:
Clostridium difficile, Cultural Identification, Antimicrobial Susceptibility, E-Test
JOURNAL NAME:
Advances in Microbiology,
Vol.5 No.5,
May
18,
2015
ABSTRACT: Clostridium difficile is the major etiological agent of
nosocomial diarrhea primarily precipitated by antimicrobial therapy. We
prospectively investigated the antibiogram profile of C. difficile strains isolated from patients reporting to a tertiary
care hospital in North India. Fecal samples obtained from 1110 suspected
cases of C. difficile infection were cultured for
isolation of C. difficile. Colonies
suspected as those of C. difficile were identified by phenotypic and molecular methods. Antimicrobial
susceptibility of C. difficile isolates for different classes of antibiotics was determined using the Epsilon
test for vancomycin, metronidazole, clindamycin and ciprofloxacin. The fecal
samples cultured for C. difficile belonged
to 709 (63.9%) males and 401 (36.1%) females. The mean age of the patients was
38.7 years. C. difficile was cultured
from 174 (15.7%) of the total samples. Antibiotic resistance was largely
observed towards clindamycin (57.5%) and ciprofloxacin (38.5%) but was
significantly low towards metronidazole (1.72%) and nil (0%) towards
vancomycin. C. difficile isolates had
a high degree of resistance towards clindamycin and ciprofloxacin with low
level of resistance to metronidazole and none towards vancomycin. Antibiogram
surveillance of C. difficile will
help for clinical practice and add to the epidemiological data of the
organisms.