Abstract

BACKGROUND: Acinetobacter baumannii is an opportunistic pathogen, which causes a wide range of infections in hospitals, especially in intensive care units. Nowadays, due to the high resistance of Acinetobacter bumanni to antibiotics, this study, in addition to the phenotypic and genotypic investigations of drug resistance, focus on determining the molecular types of Acinetobacter baumannii isolated from patients in Khorramabad city by pulsed field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) method Materials and Methods: In this cross-sectional study, 50 samples of Acinetobacter baumannii were collected from educational hospitals in Khorramabad city, Iran, from January to August 2015. They were identified in the laboratory using biochemical tests and culture methods. After determining the drug resistance pattern by disc diffusion method and percentage of resistance genes to carbapenems, Acinetobacter baumannii isolates were analyzed using PFGE method by the Apa1 enzyme. RESULTS: The highest antibiotic resistance was observed for Acinetobacter baumannii strains against ampicillin-sulbactam (100) and aztreonam (98) and the highest sensitivity to polymixin B (100) and colistin (94), and also after OXA-51 like gene present in all samples, the OXA-23-like gene was positive in 44 (88) samples. PFGE results showed that Acinetobacter baumannii strains had 33 different pulsotype patterns, of which 27 patterns had more than one strain and 23 had only one strain. CONCLUSION: Due to the high resistance of Acinetobacter baumannii and easy to release and the ability to transfer resistance genes, resistance control methods should be used in hospital area disinfection and the observance of hygiene tips by the personnel on the one hand and reduction of antibiotic use on the other should be taken into account.