African Journal of Biotechnology Vol. 4 (9), pp. 942-945, September 2005          
ISSN 1684–5315 © 2005 Academic Journals

Full Length Research Paper

Antimicrobial resistance has become a great public health problem worldwide and multi-drug resistance Staphylococcus aureus has been widely reported. This study determined the pattern of resistance to ten commonly used antibiotics. Urine samples collected from healthy women volunteers in the Abuja were cultured and screened for S. aureus using standard microbiological procedures. The antibiotic susceptibility of the isolates was investigated using disc diffusion technique. A total of 60 (40%) S. aureus isolates were isolated from 150 urine samples collected. Of these, 19 (32%), 22 (36%) and 19 (32%) were from married but not pregnant, pregnant and single women, respectively. The isolates were highly resistant to ampicillin (91.7%), clindamycin (78.3%), cephalexin (75%), methicillin (71.7%) and vancomycin (68.3%) but had very low resistance to gentamicin (3.3%), ciprofloxacin (3.3%), ofloxacin (3.3%), sparfloxacin (3.3%) and pefloxacin (10.0%). A total of 43 (71.7%) of the isolates showed multi-drug resistance and only 3 (5%) were susceptible to all the antibiotics tested. Multi-drug resistant S. aureus is highly prevalent in the urine of healthy women investigated in Federal Capital Territory. This calls for effective measures against irrational use of antibiotics.

 Key words: Prevalence, community-associated, antibiotics, multi-resistant, Staphylococcus aureus, healthy women