Resistance patterns of bacterial isolates to antimicrobials from 3 hospitals in the United Arab Emirates.
OBJECTIVE
To compare the resistance pattern of common bacterial pathogens to commonly used drugs.


METHODS
Information and statistics of antimicrobial resistance for 1994 and 2005 were collected from the 3 hospital microbiology laboratories in the United Arab Emirates. The resistance patterns of Staphylococcus aureus, Escherichia coli, Klebsiella spp, and Pseudomonas aeruginosa to several front-line drugs were estimated. All laboratories used automatic machines (Vitek 2), which identifies and determines minimum inhibitory concentrations simultaneously.


RESULTS
Increased resistance was observed for Staphylococcus aureus, (n=315, 2005) to erythromycin (approximately 6 fold, Al-Ain Hospital only), cloxacillin (Al-Ain Hospital), and gentamicin (more than 3-10 folds in all hospitals). Increased penicillin resistance was not observed. For the common gram-negative organisms, there was a high resistance to ampicillin, gentamicin, ceftriaxone, ciprofloxacin, and imipenem, which seemed to increase for Escherichia coli, (by 4.2-200%, n=305, 2005); however, there was very little resistance to imipenem (0.4%) in Tawam Hospital. Variable resistance patterns were obtained for Pseudomonas aeruginosa (n=316, 2005) and Klebsiella spp, (n=316, 2005) against aminoglycosides, cephalosporins, ciprofloxacin, and norfloxacin.


CONCLUSIONS
Overall, there was an obvious increase in resistance of bacteria and the prevalence rate to a number of drugs from 1-120 folds during the 11-year period.
Al-Dhaheri
Ahmed S
AS
Department of Pharmacology, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, United Arab Emirates University, Al Ain, United Arab Emirates.
Al-Niyadi
Mohammed S
MS
Al-Dhaheri
Ahmed D
AD
Bastaki
Salim M
SM
D000900:Anti-Bacterial Agents / Q000494:pharmacology*; D004352:Drug Resistance, Microbial; D006761:Hospitals; D014479:United Arab Emirates
D000900:Anti-Bacterial Agents