Abstract

This paper aimed to study the drug resistance patterns and the reliability of antibiogram and pulsed field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) patterns in epidemiological study of uropathogenic Escherichia coli (UPEC) isolated from the children with community acquired urinary tract infection (UTI). Totally ninety E. coli strains were isolated from urine samples of children with community acquired UTI and tested for susceptibility to fourteen different antibiotics, using disc diffusion method. To study the molecular epidemiology of these strains, their genomic patterns were determined using PFGE. Forty five patterns of resistance have been recognized for the E. coli strains. High prevalence of resistance to ampicillin (80.2%), trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole (76%), and tetracycline (70.8%) was seen among the UPEC isolates. All the isolates were 100% sensitive to imipenem. In PFGE, sixty five patterns from the genome of E. coli strains were observed.  Based on drawn dendrogram the sample patterns were divided into two groups. All the samples except two have different clonalities. In conclusions it seems that imipenem, amikacin and nitrofurantoin can serve as drug of choice for the treatment of UTI caused by E. coli, respectively. With regard to high differentiation power of PFGE method in comparison with antibiogram and according to the obtained patterns and high diversity of these profiles, no epidemic UPEC was determined in the studied population.

Key words: Escherichia coli, urinary tract infection, children, epidemiology, genotyping.