Abstract:
Background: Staphylococcus aureus is the most common cause of nosocomial and community acquired
infections. The infections caused by the drug resistant strains of Staphylococcus aureus are difficult to treat in
hospital settings.
Objective: This study was aimed to determine antimicrobial susceptibility patterns of Staphylococcus aureus at
the University of Gondar Teaching and Referral Hospital, Northwest Ethiopia.
Methods: A retrospective cross sectional study was conducted from September 2013 to February 2014 to
investigate S. aureus prevalence and its antibiotic susceptibility patterns among different specimens. Antibacterial
susceptibility testing was done by disk diffusion method on Mueller-Hinton agar. ens collected from various sections
of the Hospital in the University. Completeness of the collected data was checked and entered into the computer.
Chi-square test was used to check whether there is the association between the socio-demographic characteristics
of the study participants and positivity to S. aureus. P-value less than 0.05 was considered as statistically significant.
Results: Of the 4321 different samples cultured, 309 of them were positive for S. aureus. The overall prevalence
of S. aureus was 7.2% and the prevalence in the type of samples cultured were: abscess (22%), followed by body
discharges (19.2%), wound secretions (17.9%), pus (17.5%), blood (9.1%), urine (4.4%) and body fluid (0.6%). The
sensitivity rates of the isolates from the highest to the lowest were: vancomycin (99.6%), cefoxitin (92.6%),
clindamycin (89.5%), Ceftriaxone (86.7%), ciprophloxacillin (81.2%), gentamycin (80%), chloramphelicol (78%),
norfloxicillin (65%), erythromycin (53.2%), co-trimoxazole (39.7%), penicillin (37.7%), ampicillin (36.3%), amoxicillin
(34.5%) & tetracycline (30.6). One hundred and sixty six (53.7%) of the isolates showed multi-resistance to
antimicrobial agents.
