Abstract

Burns constitute a major health concern with respect to morbidity and mortality; due to the risk of burn wounds infections caused by multi-drug resistant nosocomial pathogens. The present study was carried out to recover, identify the isolates, and to determine the antimicrobial susceptibility patterns of these pathogens from burn wounds in Khyber Teaching Hospital (KTH) Peshawar, during September 2007 to June 2008. A total of 119 bacterial isolates were recovered from 170 non-duplicate samples collected aseptically from admitted patients in the burn unit of KTH. The most commonly isolated pathogens were Staphylococcus aureus (69, 57.98%), Pseudomonas aeruginosa 23 (19.33%),Klebsiella pneumoniae (10, 8.40%), Proteus spp. (5, 4.20%), Staphylococcus epidermidis(4, 3.36%) Escherichia coli + Enterobacter spp. (3, 2.52%) each and Citrobacter spp. /Serratia spp. (1, 0.84%) each. Antimicrobial susceptibility was determined by disc diffusion using Kirby-Bauer method following Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute (CLSI) guidelines. Among the S. aureus, 56 (81.16%) were MRSA. Most of the strains, including MRSA were multidrug resistant. These strains revealed high degree of resistance to all antibiotics used in the present study. However, Linezolid showed maximum effectiveness against MRSA.

Key words: Burn wound infections, antibiotic resistance, MRSA, nosocomial infection.