Unregulated use of antibiotics in Siliguri city vis-a-vis occurrence of MAR bacteria in community waste water and river Mahananda, and their potential for resistance gene transfer.

The unregulated use of antibiotics, including therapeutic and prophylactic prescribing, in the fastest growing city of West Bengal, Siliguri, was studied indirectly from a random survey conducted on retail medicine sellers at their counters. Ciprofloxacin, ampicillin, norfioxacin and amoxycillin were the highest retailed antibiotics and 58% of the city pharmacies sold antibiotics even without prescriptions. To understand the influence of the extent of antibiotic use by the community on the collective bacterial flora in the aquatic environment, we have determined the fraction(s) of Standard Plate Count (SPC) bacteria resistant to different antibiotics and multiple antibiotic resistance (MAR) profile of resistant SPC isolates from two municipal open drains and Mahananda river water samples of Siliguri. Within the MAR groups of Drain I and Drain II samples, 37.44% and 77.43% respectively were resistant to all seven antibiotics (ampicillin, chloramphenicol, ciprofloxacin, kanamycin, netilmicin, streptomycin and tetracycline) used in the study. Twenty Gram-negative SPC MAR isolates were examined for the presence of plasmids. Antibiotic resistance was shown to be associated with a carriage of a 47 kb (D1QN - 9), 48 kb (D2QN - 14) and 49.4 and 3.6 kb (MR - 1) plasmids, which were transmissible to the Escherichia coli DH5alpha recipient. The rapid spread of antibiotic resistance genes in bacterial population as a consequence of indiscriminate use of antibiotics, which can be partly attributed to plasmid-mediated horizontal transfer was discussed.