Abstract

Hospital surfaces play an important role in nosocomial infection (NI), in that the health-care environment contains a diverse population of microorganisms. Antibiotic resistance is the ability of a micro-organism to withstand the effects of an antibiotic, which is a specific type of drug resistance. Antibiotic resistance evolves naturally from a natural selection through random mutation, but could also be engineered by other selections. The research was performed with laboratory method in Esfahan City and the study as a whole comprised 194 strains obtained from hospital surfaces’ samples. These strains were randomly selected from different wards of the hospital with sterile swab and NB medium. According to the results, Staphylococcus spp. (54.7%), Bacillus spp. (25%) and Enterobacteriaceae (10.7%) consist of isolated bacteria. The results of this study show high frequency of antibiotic resistant strain on hospital surfaces. Establishing systems for monitoring antimicrobial resistance in hospitals and the community, and linking these findings to resistance and disease surveillance data is fundamental to developing treatment guidelines accurately and to assessing the effectiveness of interventions appropriately.

Key words: Antibiotic resistance, nosocomial infection, hospital surfaces.