DOI: 10.36347/sjams.2020.v08i01.022

Pages: 114-119

Introduction: Urinary tract infections (UTI) account for significant health burden among all age groups. Isolation and identification of the uropathogens by bacterial culture and selection of appropriate antimicrobial drugs through susceptibility testing is the mainstay in management of UTI cases. Material & Methods: This was a cross-sectional study which was carried out in the Department of Microbiology, Rajshahi Medical College (RMC) to evaluate the performance of a Chromogenic agar medium (commercially named as HiCrome UTI agar) and conventional culture system like Blood agar (BA) and MacConkey (MAC) agar for isolation and presumptive identification of the uropathogens. Results: Slightly higher bacterial growth was noted among female (29.33%) than male (17.00%) patients as a whole and 15-45 years was the leading age group with higher number of culture positive cases. Out of 300 urine samples cultured, a total of 139 (46.33%) yielded bacterial growth and 161 (53.67%) were negative for bacterial growth. Bacterial isolates included E. coli 91(62.75%), Klebsiella spp. 18(12.41%), Enterococcus spp. 16(11.03%), Pseudomonas spp. 09(06.28%), Staph. saprophyticus 05(3.44%), Enterobactor spp. 04(2.75%) and Proteus spp. 02(1.37%). It is evident from the present study that both HiCrome UTI agar and BA media supported growth of all 145 bacteria, while MAC agar yielded 133(91.72%) bacterial growths. The rate of presumptive identification of the isolates was found significantly higher (97.24%) on HiCrome UTI agar when compared with the MacConkey agar (80.68%) and Blood agar (27.58%) media.