Microbiological Safety and Antibiogram Analysis of Selected Food Products Obtained in the Marketplace of Peshawar and Mardan, KPK, Pakistan

Abstract

Foodborne diseases are very frequent and can easily transmit from contaminated food and food handlers. Among the foodborne pathogens, strains of Staphylococcus aureus, Bacillus cereus, Listeria monocytogen and Clostridium are very important because of its presence in a wide range of foodstuffs. A total of 520 food samples were collected at Peshawar (50%) and Mardan (50%), Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan, from April 2016 to March 2017. Isolates were cultured and discriminated by Gram stain, followed by biochemical identification, disk diffusion assay was performed using antibacterial and antifungal agents. Out of 520, only 122 (23.46%) samples were positive for various types of bacterial and fungal pathogens. Gram-positive bacteria was the predominant (70.49%) followed by fungal pathogens (26.23%) and Gram-negative bacterial pathogens (3.27%) among the total positive samples. Prominent bacterial samples were Staphylococcus aureus, Bacillus spp., Clostridium spp., Staphylococcus

Ethnobotanical studies of plant resources of Taftan Mountain, Sistan and Baluchestan in southeastern region of Iran

“…The results were in line with those obtained by the previous similar research in Taftan (Maleki and Akhani 2018). Our results were also comparable to studies from Pakistan (Shedayi and Gulshan 2012;Murad et al 2013;Abbas et al 2014;Adnan et al 2014;Khan et al 2014a;Sivasankari et al 2014;Yaseen et al 2015;Khan et al 2016;Abbas et al 2017) and India (Muthu et al 2006). Although we asked the young generation to participate in our study and act as informants, they unfortunately refused and claimed that they had no knowledge about the use of the plants except few young people that lived in zone A.…”

“…It is evident that women are important key sources of traditional knowledge as they are well informed regarding the values of the plants especially about local medicinal plants due to their role in Baluch families as responsible for the family's health. The present results are in agreement with the previous studies in Iran (Rajaei and Mohamadi 2012;Farouji and Khodayari 2016;Maleki and Akhani 2018), in neighboring Pakistan (Shedayi and Gulshan 2012;Abbas et al 2014;Begum et al 2014;Khan et al 2016) or India (Sivasankari et al 2014). Except in some cases (10%), the range of traditional information on the use of plants was the same between men and women.…”

Antimicrobial Resistance Patterns in Hazara Division: A Cross-Sectional Study in The Pre-and Post-Covid-19 Era

“…Several other studies show the same trend [48]. As the staphylococcus ssp is the normal ora of the skin to the nasal cavity and gut [49,50] so it is mostly isolated from the pus samples followed by urine, wound, blood, and HVS [51]. Some uctuation in the prevalence of the climate conditions and the high temperature reduces the growth of S.aureus colonization [52,53].…”