Acinetobacter Spp: Resistance and therapeutic decisions at the turn of the novel millennium.

This study was planned to evaluate sample wise isolation and antimicrobial resistant trends of Acinetobacter spp in different departments of a tertiary care hospital. This was a transversal descriptive study, carried out in the clinical microbiology laboratory of the Allama Iqbal Medical College/ Jinnah Hospital, Lahore, Pakistan, during the period of January 2015 to December 2016. Every clinical specimen was processed for bacterial culture and antimicrobial susceptibly testing. A total of 3590 (2015=1780, 2016=1810) clinical specimens were processed. Of the total, only 54.7% were gram-negative, among these Acinetobacter spp were isolated from 10.1% and 16.5% samples respectively in 2015-16 with an overall rate of 24.3%. The highest occurrence of Acinetobacter spp isolates was reported from Intensive care units (ICU) (54%) followed by surgical units (25%) and medical units (16%). It is noteworthy that ICU and internal medicine showed the highest resistance rates, whereas, lower resistance rate was observed for the outdoor patients (OPD). Although collistin showed 0% resistant while ceftriaxone, ciprofloxacin, gentamicin, and tigecycline showed 90%, 68%, 66%, 66% and 62% resistance against Acinetobacter spp. respectively. An alarming increase in the resistance rate of meropenem, cefoperazone/sulbactam, piperacillin/ tazobactam, ciprofloxacin, and imipenem was observed from the year 2015 to 2016. This startling resistance acquired by Acinetobacter spp. within a period of one year, represent very limited therapeutic options left for the infections caused by Acinetobacter spp. Unavailability of effective drugs and limited therapeutic options enforce the health care practitioners to prescribe expensive and broad range antibiotics, which may cause harm to the patient. Therefore, it is need of an hour to better understand the antimicrobial patterns and optimize antimicrobial prescription policies for the control of multidrug-resistant Acinetobacter spp.