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ABSTRACT
Antibiotic resistance has become a major global threat, making treatment of infections tougher especially with high cost of treatments. This study was done to determine the multiple antibiotic resistance (MAR) index of Klebsiella pneumoniae isolated from various clinical specimens of patients attending University of Benin Teaching Hospital (UBTH), Benin City, Edo State, Nigeria. A total of one hundred (100) clinical isolates of Klebsiella pneumoniae isolated from inpatients and outpatients attending UBTH were used for the study. Isolates were identified by standard microbiological methods. Antibiotic susceptibility testing was carried out using disc diffusion technique (Kirby Bauer’s Method). The MAR index was calculated by dividing the number of antibiotics the isolates were resistant to by the total number of antibiotics used in the study. The result of the susceptibility test showed that Klebsiella pneumoniae is a multidrug resistant organism with a total of 24 isolates showed resistance to the 12 antibiotics tested. The MAR index ranged from 0.42 to 1.00 with the mean value of 0.7994. Klebsiella pneumoniae had presented a high resistance to amoxicillin-clavulanate (97%), cefuroxime (96%), nalidixic acid (95%), cefexime (95%), ampiclox (90%), cefotaxime (89%), and nitrofurantoin (85%). The MAR index of Klebsiella pneumoniae isolated from patients younger than 18 years old (0.74) was lower than that gotten for those older than 18 years old (0.82). The Klebsiella pneumoniae isolates from clinical specimens of inpatients showed a higher MAR index of 0.82 than that of outpatients (0.74). These findings should be considered a major public health concern, and measures must be put in place to mitigate this problem such as making antimicrobial susceptibility testing mandatory before drugs are dispensed, patients should use antibiotics only when prescribed by a certified health professional and the government should support more research in this area.
