Fazle Elahi Noorani¹, Mohius Sunnah², Abdullah Al Mahmud³
1. Assistant Professor, Department of Medicine, North East Medical College Hospital, Sylhet
2. Registrar, Department of Medicine, North East Medical College Hospital, Sylhet
3. Medical Officer, Department of Medicine, North East Medical College Hospital, Sylhet
Abstract
In any health-care-setting throughout the world, and irrespective of age or sex or economic status, a good number of patients seek medical help daily for their sufferings from ‘acute respiratory tract infections (RTI). To treat such diseases, physicians often prescribe antibiotics empirically, per their clinical judgement and to the local pattern of bacterial respiratory infections. Unfortunately, many of these antibiotic trials fail to produce the expected result, simply because of an inappropriate selection. The sole purpose of this study was, therefore, to aid in the empirical selection of appropriate antibiotic, chosen based on sputum’s gram-staining, bypassing the regular dependency on the expensive & time-consuming tests like sputum’s culture-sensitivity.According to this study of sputum-samples from RTI-patients, the most sensitive antibiotics appeared to be the Fluroquinolones (70%), followed by Ceftriaxone (55.7%) and Azithromycin (53%); while the least sensitive antibiotics appeared to be Cotrimoxazole (18.6%), followed by the Aminoglycosides (23%) and the Carbapenems (28.57%). Correlation between Gram-staining & Culture of the same sputum samples revealed that Gm-positive Cocci (either in chains or pairs) resulted in Streptococcal growth (p <0.05), while Gm-negative Rods resulted in E. coli growth (p <0.05), which altogether comprised >85% of our study samples.
Key Words: Gram staining, Streptococcus, Fluroquinolones.