Secular trends of antimicrobial resistance of blood isolates in a newly founded Greek hospital

BACKGROUND Antimicrobial resistance is one of the most challenging issues in modern medicine. METHODS We evaluated the secular trends of the relative frequency of blood isolates and of the pattern of their in vitro antimicrobial susceptibility in our hospital during the last four and a half years. RESULTS Overall, the data regarding the relative frequency of blood isolates in our newly founded hospital do not differ significantly from those of hospitals that are functioning for a much longer period of time. A noteworthy emerging problem is the increasing antimicrobial resistance of Gram-negative bacteria, mainly Acinetobacter baumannii and Klebsiella pneumoniae to various classes of antibiotics. Acinetobacter baumannii isolates showed an increase of resistance to amikacin (p = 0.019), ciprofloxacin (p = 0.001), imipenem (p < 0.001), and piperacillin/tazobactam (p = 0.01) between the first and second period of the study. CONCLUSION An alarming increase of the antimicrobial resistance of Acinetobacter baumannii isolates has been noted during our study.