Abstract

The increasing use of antibiotics in both human medicine and animal agriculture leads to the decline in the effectiveness of antibiotics. Enterococci are natural intestinal flora which are important reservoir of antibiotic resistance genes and have the ability to transfer their resistance traits to other bacteria. In this report, antibacterial drug resistance of broiler chickens isolated Enterococcus faecalis and Enterococcus faecium were examined using Kibry-Bauer disk diffusion method. 93% of E. faecalis and 98% of E. faecium isolates were resistant to one or more antibiotics. The most frequent resistance properties were resistance to erythromycin (80% in E. faecalis and 82% in E. faecium) and tetracycline (73% in E. faecalis and 75% in E. faecium). No vancomycin-resistant E. faecalis were isolated but 9% of E. faecium isolates were resistant to vancomycin (VRE). These high amounts of drug resistant enterococci can be transfer from animal to human and suggest the need for restriction on the use of antibiotics as food additives and rational use of antimicrobial therapy of infections.

Key words: Antibacterial drug resistance, enterococci, poultry.