ANTIBIOTIC SUSCEPTIBILITY AND PLASMID PROFILE OF ESCHERICHIA COLI FROM DOOR HANDLES IN TWO TERTIARY INSTITUTIONS IN NASARAWA STATE, NIGERIA

Contamination of door handles with antibiotic resistant bacteria can be a major threat to public health, as the antibiotic resistant determinants can be transferred to other pathogenic bacteria thus, compromising the treatment of severe bacterial infections. Escherichiacolia harmless commensal and a versatile pathogen,has been known to develop or acquire resistance to a variety of antibiotics by different mechanisms. Thus this study therefore isolatedE. coli from door handles in Nasarawa State University, Keffi and Federal Polytechnic, Nasarawa and determined their susceptibilities to currently prescribed antibiotics using standard microbiological procedures. A total of 62 E. coli were isolated out of 200 door handles sampled and their susceptibilities to ten different commonly used antibiotics were determined. All the isolates had 87 – 100% resistance to all tested antibiotics with the highest susceptibility (13%) exhibited to only Gentamicin and Imipenem. Thirty-two of the isolates have Multiple-Antibiotic Resistance (MAR) index of 1.0 and 21(65.6%) of them produced β-lactamase enzymes. Thirteen (59.09%) of the multiple antibiotics resistant E. coli isolates transferred resistance plasmidProteus mirabilisvia conjugation. Electrophoresis of plasmid DNA in the test multi-antibiotics resistant E. coli isolates showed varying number of plasmids with molecular weights ranging between 1200 and 3000 base pairs. This study has shown that multi-antibiotic resistance genes from test E. coli could be transmitted to pathogenic bacteria which can result in serious health hazard. Thus, improved hygiene practices should be encouraged and constant microbiological surveillance of door handles in these higher institutions should be encouraged to determine effective antibiotics to solve the health hazard that may arise from E. coli infections.