Tetracycline Resistant Genes in E. coli Isolated from UTI and Diarrhea
Patients in Zaria, Nigeria

Tetracycline (TC) is one of the widely used antibiotics for the treatment of infections with significant therapeutic effect due to its broad spectrum. But due to the emergence of high percentages of tetracycline resistance and the recent reoccurrence of multidrug resistance isolates in clinical settings, its use in hospitals have drastically reduced. This study evaluates the percentage of TC resistant in clinical isolates of E. coli from UTI and diarrhea patients in Zaria, Nigeria. Out of the 86 E. coli isolates collected from 4 hospitals for the period of 6 months (April-September, 2014), 68.6% (59) were observed to be resistant to TC using both disc diffusion and MIC (range of ≥ 4 μg/ml) methods. The antibiotic susceptibility profile of the isolates showed that the isolates had varied antibiotic resistant profile to the 14 antibiotics tested. Significant percentage (35.6% (21)) of the isolates also exhibited simultaneous resistance to Ciprofloxacin, Gentamicin and Amoxicillin. The isolates were also observed to have high MARI, and there molecular analysis showed that 95% (20) of the MDR isolates had TetA gene while 90.5% (19) had TetB gene. Our results showed that there is a correlation between phenotypic TC resistance and genomic TetA and TetB carriage in E. coli isolates from UTI and diarrhea patients in Zaria, Nigeria.