No abstract

The often-high mortality and morbidity rates of surgical site infections are the concern of most health practitioners including administrators globally. The need to know the bacterial agents responsible and their treatability to common antibiotics was the main thrust of this study. Two hundred surgical site swabs were collected from two hospitals and investigated. The swabs were cultured and organisms identified according to standard procedures. A prevalence rate of 31.5 % was obtained from the surgical sites investigated. Direct gram staining gave a greater recovery rate of incriminated organisms than cultural methods. Staphylococcus aureus was the most encountered pathogen with 13.0 % prevalence rate followed by Pseudomonas aeruginosa (6.5 %), Proteus mirabilis (6.0 %) and Klebsiella aerogenes (4.0 %).The least encountered pathogens were Beta-haemolytic streptococci and Escherichia coli with prevalence rates of 1.0 % each. Statistically, chi square analysis showed that there was no significant difference in the number of isolates from the two health facilities at 99 % confidence limit. Susceptibility of isolates was more with the aminoglycosides than with the penicillins. This study has thus revealed that some hospitals are not doing enough to stem the tide of surgical site infections.