Identification and antibiotic susceptibility profiling of Escherichia coli isolated from water sample and vendor’s hand swab in Dhaka Metropolitan, Bangladesh

Abstract

The study was focused to look at the microbial composition of water used in vegetable markets and hand swabs of vegetable market vendors to find out whether it can be a source of E. coli that are resistant to antibiotics. The samples were collected from four different markets located in four distinct areas of Dhaka. This research aimed to find out the degree of antibiotic resistance among Escherichia coli isolated from water and hand swab samples. From the four selected areas 36 samples ( 24 water samples and 9 hand swab samples) were collected . To be more specific there were two types of water samples, one is vegetable wash water and other is the source water. From analyzing the samples it indicates that vegetable washed water samples contain the most bacterial growth among three types of sample. Most bacterial isolates displayed modest intermediate levels which is between 3.45% and 41.38%, with Gentamicin and Kanamycin having the highest levels. On the contrary, two of the antibiotics Erythromycin and Ampicillin have shown considerably low levels of sensitivity to the isolates while expressing 89.66% and 100.00% of resistance respectively. The lowest rate of intermediate, on the other hand, is within 3%-40% across all isolates. Different antibiotic resistance characteristics might be seen in other isolates. Overall, among the isolates, there were 48.30% isolates showing sensitivity, 48.30% with MDR patterns, and 3.4% with extended drug resistance (XDR). It is alarming that some strains of Escherichia coli can cause severe illness like septicemia, meningitis, rheumatoid arthritis, reactive arthritis, atherosclerosis, and haemolytic uremic syndrome.