RESUMO
BACKGROUND: Increasing antibiotic resistance in Gram negative bacteria has led to the need for a faster and reliable method for determining antimicrobial susceptibility testing. In a resource poor setting like ours, it's also important to look for methods that will be clinically and economically beneficial to the patient. AIM: This study was aimed at evaluating the Epsilometer test (E-test) and conventional methods for determining antimicrobial susceptibility of isolates of Gram-negative enteric bacteria to ciprofloxacin and gentamicin. METHODS: Disc diffusion, E-test, broth dilution and agar dilution methods were performed on 54 bacterial isolates. RESULTS: Using the E-test, 88.9% of bacterial isolates were resistant to ciprofloxacin, 92.6% were resistant using broth microdilution, 96.3% were resistant using agar dilution and 72.2% were resistant using disc diffusion. Minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC50) of isolates for gentamicin showed significant difference for all the techniques (p < 0.05) while MIC90 for gentamicin and MIC50 and MIC90 for ciprofloxacin for all the techniques had no significant difference (p > 0.05). Both E-test and broth dilution methods showed high levels of agreement (p > 0.05), there were low levels of agreement between E-test and agar dilution method (p < 0.05), especially at MIC50. CONCLUSION: The E-test can therefore be considered a reliable method to determine antimicrobial susceptibility testing and it gives results which are at least as accurate as those obtained by the broth dilution method.
