Abstract

In Eastern part of Nigeria, where there is inadequate monitoring of food safety practices as well as prudent antibiotic use, hawked foods are usually exposed to contamination by antibiotic resistant bacteria owing to improper and unhygienic handling of food by street vendors. This cross-sectional study investigated the prevalence and antibiotics resistance of Klebsiella species isolated from street-vended sauced cow skin in Ikwuano and Umuahia LGAs of Abia State, Nigeria. A total of 360 ready to eat palm oil sauced cow skin were processed using standard microbiological techniques and isolates identified using VITEK 2 system. A total of 76 coliforms were isolated, out of which 48 (63.2%) were Klebsiella species. K. oxytoca was 32(66.7%) and K. pneumoniae was 16 (33.3%). Antimicrobial susceptibility of the isolates was determined by disk diffusion against a panel of 21 antibiotics. The study showed that majority of the isolates 68 (89.5%) were from samples collected from vendors practicing poor hygiene. Of the 360 vendors (participants), 100 (27.8%) responded to having incidence of diarrhea, out of which only 8(2.2%) had antibiotics prescription for treatment from clinicians, while 352(97.8) participants got from other non-professional sources. K. oxytoca had the highest number of isolates resistant to the tested antibiotic agents. All Klebsiella isolates had multiple antibiotic resistance indices (MARI) of 0.2 to 0.6. The Klebsiella species isolated from hawked sauced cow skin in this study were all found to be multidrug resistant which poses a serious public health challenge, implicating street food as uncommon reservoir to antibiotic resistant bacteria.