Distribution and antibiotic susceptibility of Streptococcus pneumoniae isolated from hospitalized and outpatient's children in educational hospitals of Ahvaz, Iran

Abstract

Streptococcus pneumoniae is known as the leading cause of bacterial pneumonia and major cause of death in children under five years annually. Its growing resistance to a variety of antibiotics became contentious. We performed this study to evaluate the prevalence and antimicrobial susceptibility in S. pneumoniae in educational hospitals of Ahvaz. Thirty-two S. pneumoniae isolated from clinical samples of children, referring to educational hospital of Ahvaz, Iran. All samples were investigated by common microbiology tests including Gram staining, blood agar, bile esculin and optochin disk. For antibiotic resistance evaluation, the disk diffusion method is performed using Mueller-Hinton agar. Isolates were tested by penicillin, erythromycin, oxacillin, vancomycin, levofloxacin, trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole and clindamycin disks. All of the 32 samples were confirmed as positive for S. pneumoniae. Twenty-two of samples (64.70%) were penicillin-susceptible while 8 (23.52%) were intermediately-resistant and 4 (11.76%) were resistant. Also, 20 (62.5%), 25 (78.12%) and 16 (50%) of the isolates were resistant to erythromycin, trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole and clindamycin, respectively. Near all of the samples (29 of the isolates) were susceptible to levofloxacin. All of the samples were susceptible to vancomycin. Due to the results, the most of the isolates were susceptible to common antibiotics except erythromycin, trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole and clindamycin. Our results showed encouraging susceptibility for vancomycin.