ANTIMICROBIAL ACTIVITY OF CLAY ON SKIN MICROORGANISMS

ABSTRACT

There is an impending crisis in healthcare brought about by an era of untreatable infections caused by bacterial resistant to various available antibiotics, thus there is an urgent need to identify novel antimicrobial agents to counter the uprising threat. The aim of the study was to determine the antimicrobial activities of clay on some pathogenic skin microbes. Antimicrobial activities of clay were performed using the agar well diffusion method and ciprofloxacin and ketoconazole were used as control for bacterial and fungi respectively. From the results, the zones of inhibition for the clay sample were measured in millimeters. Of all the samples worked on sample 1, 2 and 3 showed no zone of inhibition (NZ) while sample 4, 5 and 6 showed zones of inhibition ranging from 11mm to 16mm with the exception of Aspergillus spp and susceptible Pseudomonas showing no zone of inhibition (NZ) for sample 5. The zones of inhibition for the control were 25mm (Aspergillus spp), 14mm (multi-drug resistant Pseudomonas), 45mm (susceptible Pseudomonas) and 35mm (susceptible Staphylococcus), while methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus showed no zone of inhibition for control. The results in this study revealed that some of the clay samples showed inhibitory activity against the selected microbial isolates, although not significant as compared with the controls. Overall, this research contributes to the growing body of knowledge on clay's potential as an antimicrobial agent for skin microbes, offering a promising avenue for future skincare innovations.