THE TERRORIST STILL LURKS IN THE HOSPITAL- PREVALENCE OF MRSA

BACKGROUND MRSA poses a very serious problem producing difficult to treat infections in the community as well as in health facilities. Out of these, Health Care associated MRSA infections have the additional problem of being multidrug resistant. This fact led us to conduct this study in a tertiary care hospital in Kolkata. MATERIALS AND METHODS Samples of pus were collected from all the wards of the hospital. Samples were received within 30 minutes of their collection. The usual protocol of Gram stain, culture, biochemical tests and antibiotic sensitivity was followed. Phenotypic method using 30 mu g cefoxitin disc was followed for identifying MRSA according to CLSI guidelines. The results were tabulated, and prevalence of MRSA was calculated. RESULTS Out of 102 Staphylococcus aureus samples 35.3% were found to be methicillin resistant. This prevalence of MRSA is found to be at par with a study done by Sangram S Patel et al. in 2015. CONCLUSION Thus, the results of the present study show a high endemicity of MRSA in our hospital in Kolkata. Though our results show 50% of the MRSA were MDR which could be due to selective antibiotic pressure. But fortunately, none of the isolates were XDR or PDR. This poses a serious problem for drug therapy because the treatment options become limited to potentially toxic antimicrobials like vancomycin, teicoplanin, streptogramins, linezolid and ceftaroline leading to increased mortality and morbidity.