Abstract:

Background: Infections caused by multidrug resistant (MDR) bacteria remain a public health threat for patients and health care workers. There is scarcity of data on bacterial infections and their drug susceptibility patterns in body cavities infections in Mwanza region Tanzania. Hence, this study aimed at assessing prevalence of bacterial and their antimicrobial susceptibility patterns (AST) from infections involving body cavities at Mwanza region Tanzania.

Methods: A cross sectional hospital-based study was conducted from June to August 2019 by recruiting admitted patients. Different body fluids were collected, enriched in (BHI) and then cultured on blood agar (BA), MacConkey agar (MCA), and chocolate agar (CA) plates and then incubated aerobically and microaerophilically. Bacterial identification was done by using gram stain, acid-fast staining (AFB), colony morphology, and biochemical tests. Antimicrobial susceptibility testing was conducted on Muller-Hinton agar (MHA) using disk diffusion method. Data was analysed by using STATA version 13.

Results: A total of 92 participants enrolled in this study. The majority were males 54 (58.7%) with median age 33 (6-35) years. Overall, 25.0% (n=23/92) of the body fluids had bacteria growth. Most bacteria were isolates from Cerebrospinal Fluid (CSF), 62.0% (n=57/92). Most frequent bacterial isolates were S. aureus 26.1% (6/23) and Coagulase Negative Staphylococcus 26.1% (n=6/23). Gram-negative showed highest sensitivity for Amikacin (100%), Piperacillin-tazobactam (100%), Gentamicin (66.8%), and Gram positive bacteria showed high resistance to Cefoxitin/methicillin (66.7%) and sensitivity to Vancomycin (88.9%).

Conclusion: The prevalence of bacterial infection in body cavities from this study is high (25.0%), and this high recovery of pathogens may be associated with enrichment of the samples to BHI before inoculated in solid media.