The Re-emergence of Chloramphenicol Sensitive Salmonella species among Typhoid Fever Patients in the Southern Geographical Zone of Nasarawa State,

Copyright: 2015 © Ishaleku D, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. The emergence of drug resistant strains of Salmonella typhi and paratyphi has become the most challenging aspects of typhoid fever treatment due to resistance to the conventional antibiotic therapy. The objective of this study was to determine the prevalence and antibiotic susceptibility of Salmonella species among typhoid fever patients. A total of 400 stool samples were collected, processed and identified by standard microbiological method and biochemical tests. Antibiotic susceptibility was determined by disk diffusion method using 8 antibiotics. A total of 196(49.0%) Salmonella species were isolated. Of this, 78 (19.0%) and 118 (29.5%) were Salmonella typhi and Salmonella paratyphi respectively. The antibiotic susceptibility of Salmonella isolates in the study showed a high susceptibility of 85.9 % for S. typhi and 86.4 % for S. paratyphi to Chloramphenicol. All S. typhi isolates showed a low susceptibility of 20.5 % to Amoxicillin, 14.1 % to Amoxicillin/clavulinic acid, and 33.3 % to ceftriaxone. 85.2%, 87.4% and 6.9 % to Ciprofloxacin, Gentamycin and Tetracycline respectively. Salmonella paratyphi isolates on the other hand also showed higher susceptibility of 89.1%, 83.6%, 80.9%, 79.1 % to Amikacin, Ciprofloxacin, Ceftriaxone, Gentamycin and lower susceptibility of 23.6%, 36.4 % and 20.9 % to Amoxicillin, Amoxicillin/clavulinic acid an