Antibiogram and plasmid profiling of resistance bacteria isolated from the blood of Hepatitis C Virus positive individuals

Abstract

In this investigation, the types of bacteria present in the blood of Hepatitis C Virus (HCV) positive individuals attending State General Hospital, Akure, Ondo State, their antibiogram and plasmid profiling. The blood was collected and subjected to standard microbiological techniques to isolate and identify the types of bacteria present. These were subjected to antibiotics disk to determine the antibiogram profile and multiple antibiotics resistance (MAR) pattern was determined. Plasmid profiling and curing was done to determine the genetic basis for resistance of the bacterial isolates. The bacteria species identified are Staphylococcus aureus, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Escherichia coli, Streptococcus pneumoniae, Proteus mirabilis and Salmonella species and most of the isolates showed multiple antibiotics resistance (MAR). The antibiogram profile of isolates revealed Ciprofloxacin as the most effective antibiotic against most isolated bacterial species while they are resistance to most of other antibiotics especially Amoxycillin, Cotrimozazole and Ceftriazone. The plasmid analysis shows that all multiple resistant bacterial isolates harbor one or more plasmids with different molecular weights and plasmid curing converts all the isolates (MAR) which were initially resistant to the conventional antibiotics to susceptible form thereby indicating that, the resistance was plasmid mediated.