In vitro comparison of antibacterial effects of Ziziphora clinopodioides L. and some standard antibiotics on bacteria isolated from women’s urogenital tract infections

Abstract

Objectives: Medicinal aromatic herbs have been used traditionally as a strong source of natural drugs for many centuries. This work aimed to compare the antibacterial activity of Ziziphora clinopodioides’ essential oils and four standard antibiotics against some pathogenic bacteria isolated from women’s urogenital tract infections in order to replace natural antibacterial compounds from plant instead of synthetic chemical antibiotics. Materials and Methods: To evaluate the antibacterial effects of essential oils of mentioned plant and standard antibiotics including nalidixic acid, vancomycin, ceftizoxime and tetracycline according to the guideline of the standard disk diffusion method test constituted by the CLSI (formerly NCCLS) and executed on each isolate using Mueller-Hinton agar medium. Results: The results indicated that the essential oils of Ziziphora clinopodioides L. exhibited resistance to moderate and sensitive antibacterial activity on the tested bacteria with inhibition zone (IZ) value ranging from 5 ± 0.1 mm to 29.1 ± ±0.2 mm. Also at 5% level of confidence; there was no significant difference between antibacterial effect of essential oils of mentioned plants and the tested standard antibiotics. Conclusion: The present study showed that the Ziziphora clinopodioides L. essential oils’ was effective on many tested bacteria as compared to the standard antibiotics and like other species of Ziziphora has a great potency of being used as natural antimicrobial drug; therefore it can be used against bacteria causing urogenital tract infections in women. It is suggested that in this connection supplementary study should be done on experimental animal models.