Abstract
BACKGROUND: Acinetobacter species have been a leading cause of nosocomial infections, causing significant morbidity and mortality over the entire world including Ethiopia. The most important features of A. baumannii are its ability to persist in the hospital environment and rapidly develop resistance to a wide variety of antibiotics. This study aimed to determine trend of antimicrobial resistance in Acinetobacter species over a five years period. METHOD: A retrospective data regarding occurrence and antimicrobial resistance of Acinetobacter species recovered from clinical specimens referred to the national reference laboratory was extracted from microbiology laboratory data source covering a time range from 2014 to 2018. Socio-demographic characteristics and laboratory record data was analyzed using SPSS 20. RESULTS: A total of 102 strains of Acinetobacter species were analyzed from various clinical specimens. Majority of them were from pus (33.3%) followed by blood (23.5%), urine (15.6%) and body fluid (11.7%). Significant ascending trends of antimicrobial resistance was shown for meropenem (12.5% to 60.7%), ceftazidime (82.1% to 100%), ciprofloxacin (59.4% to 74.4%), ceftriaxone (87.1% to 98.6%), cefepime (80.0% to 93.3%) and pipracillin- tazobactam (67.8% to 96.3%). However, there was descending trend of antimicrobial resistance for tobramycin (56.5% to 42.8%), amikacin (42.1% to 31.4%) and trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole (79.0 to 68.2%). The overall rate of carbapenem non-susceptible and multidrug resistance rates in Acinetobacter species were 56.7% and 71.6%.respectively. CONCLUSION: A five year antimicrobial resistance trend analysis of Acinetobacter species showed increasing MDR and resistance to high potent antimicrobial agents posing therapeutic challenge in our Hospitals and health care settings. Continuous surveillance and appropriate infection prevention and control strategies need to be strengthened to circumvent the spread of multidrug resistant pathogens in health care facilities.