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Abstract
Acinetobacter baumannii is a common opportunistic pathogen that causes major nosocomial infections in hospitals. Emergence of carbapenem-resistant A. baumannii has received much attention worldwide. In this study a total of 96 isolates of A. baumannii were collected from: a surgical ICU, 50 isolates were clinical and 46 isolates were environmental. All isolates were subjected to antimicrobial susceptibility testing, screening for carbapenemase production by Modified Hodge test (MHT) and PCR and finally fingerprinting by rep-PCR. The majority of isolates were resistant to carbapenems. 22% of clinical isolates and 34.7% of environmental isolates were positive for the MHT. PCR results revealed the presence of blaOXA-51-like and blaOXA-23-like genes and the absence of blaOXA-24-like and blaOXA-58-like genes in all isolates. Rep-PCR resolved 6 clones of A. baumannii showing the genetic relation between clinical and environmental strains. It was concluded that screening for carbapenemase production by MHT may give false negative results and the genotypic methods is more accurate for carbapenemase detection. The clinical strains of A. baumannii were genetically related to the environmental strains, but with different antibiotic susceptibilities