[Antimicrobial resistance in gram negative bacteria isolated from intensive care units of Colombian hospitals, WHONET 2003, 2004 and 2005].

INTRODUCTION: Surveillance systems play a key role in the detection and control of bacterial resistance. It is necessary to constantly collect information from all institutions because the mechanisms of bacterial resistance can operate in different ways between countries, cities and even in hospitals in the same area. Therefore local information is important in order to learn about bacterial behaviour and design appropriate interventions for each institution. Between January 2003 and December 2004, the Centro Internacional de Entrenamiento e Investigaciones Médicas (CIDEIM) developed a surveillance project in 10 tertiary hospitals in 6 cities of Colombia.

OBJECTIVES: Describe the trends of antibiotic resistance among the isolates of Escherichia coli, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Pseudomona aeruginosa, Acinetobacter baumannii and Enterobacter cloacae, five of the most prevalent nosocomial Gram negative pathogens.

MATERIALS AND METHODS: The susceptibility tests were performed by automated methods in 9 hospitals and by Kirby Bauer in 1 hospital. Antibiotics with known activity against Gram negatives, according to the Clinical Laboratory Standards Institute guidelines, were selected. The laboratories performed internal and external quality controls. During the study period, the information was downloaded monthly from the databases of each microbiology laboratory and sent to CIDEIM where it was centralized in a database using the system WHONET 5.3.

RESULTS: The high resistance rates reported especially for A. baumannii, evidenced the presence of multidrug resistant bacteria in both ICUs and wards at every studied institution.

CONCLUSIONS: The creation of a national surveillance network to improve our capabilities to detect, follow up, and control the antibiotic resistance in Colombia is urgently needed.