Original Research Article

Diversity of Urinary Tract Pathogens and Drug Resistant Isolates of Escherichia Coli in different age and gender Groups of Pakistanis

MF Bashir¹*, JI Qazi², N Ahmad²,  and S Riaz³

¹The School of Biological Sciences, ²Department of Zoology, ³Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, University of the Punjab, Lahore 54590, Pakistan.

Purpose: This paper was mainly aimed to investigate drug resistance of the various urinary tract infection (UTI) pathogens from patients of different gender and age groups of Pakistanis.

Method: For these purposes, urine samples of 109 patients were analyzed. Samples were screened on CLED agar. Antimicrobial susceptibility testing was performed by Kirby Bauer's disc diffusion method. Isolated colonies were processed for biochemical characterization and antibiotic sensitivity to ampicillin, amikacin, augmentin, ceftazidime, ceftriaxone, cefuroxime, cotrimoxazole, ciprofloxin, imipenem, meropenem, tazocine, trimethoprim, gentamicin and nitrofuratoin.

Result: E.Coli was found to be the most frequent causative agent of UTIs (66%)  followed by Enterococci (8.3%), Candida spp. and Pseodomonas spp. (7.3% each), Klebsiella spp. (5.5%) and Enterobacter spp. (2.7%).  Proteus. and Morgenella species were found in less than 1% of the cases. E.coli showed variable antimicrobial resistance to different antibiotics as  92%, 86%, 80%, 62%, 47%, 20% and 4% of the isolates were found to be resistant to ampicillin, cotrimoxazole, ciprofloxin, gentamicin, nitrofuratoin and amikacin, respectively.

Conclusion: The most effective in vitro agents were found to be amikacin followed by gentamicin (among the parenterals), and ciprofloxin among the orally administratered ones. A higher prevalence of UTIs was observed in the female population and E.coli showed no resistance to nitrofuratoin in age groups of 50⁺ and 70⁺ in both genders.