Abstract

Aim: Enterococci are found in human flora and have quite low virulence. However, enterococci causenosocomial and community acquired infections, and in recent years there has been an increase in antibiotic resistance rates in these infections. The aim of this study was to evaluate the antibiotic susceptibility of Enterococcus faecalis and Enterococcus faecium, the most frequently isolated enterococcal species. Material and Method: In our study, we evaluated 727 enterococcus strains obtained from various clinical specimens that was accepted in medical microbiology laboratory from 2012 to 2016. Species identification and antibiotic susceptibility tests were performed using conventional methods and VITEK®-2 (BioMérieux, France) automated identification analyzer. Results: In this study, 450 (61.9%) E. faecalis and 277 (38.1%) E. faecium were detected from 727 enterococci strains isolated. Gender distribution of patients with Enterococcus strains isolated; 387 (53.2%) women, 340 (46.8%) males. The distribution of the clinical specimens follows as 467 (64.2%) urine, 110 (15.1%) blood, 77 (10.6%) gaita, 43 (5.9%) wound and 30 (4.1%) other specimens. Enterococci strains were most frequently isolated from urine specimens. All isolates of E. faecium and E. faecalis strains were susceptible to tigecycline. Vancomycin resistance rates were determined as 29.9% (80/268) in E.faecium isolates and 8.6% (37/432) in E. faecalis isolates. Conclusion: Increasing resistance rates in enterococci limit the use of many antibiotics against these infections. We thought that each hospital’s own surveillance programming, identification of enterococci at species level, doing antibiotic susceptibility testing, and application of treatment protocols according to these resistance patterns are effective in controlling enterococcal infections.

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