Susceptibility for antibiotics among faecal indicators and pathogenic bacteria in sewage treated effluents

The objective of this work was to study the prevalence of antibiotic resistance phenotypes among total coliforms (TC), E. coli, E. faecalis and Salmonella spp. in the sewage treated effluents generated from three sewage treatment plants in Penang Malaysia. Among the isolates tested, TC and E. coli occurred high resistance for cephalexin (100 and 90.47%), ampicillin (80.93 and 95.23%) and ciprofloxacin (19.06 and 14.3%) compared to E. faecalis (42.86, 71.4 and 4.7%) and Salmonella spp. (59.8, 47.46 and 14.3%) respectively. All E. coli strains, 76.18% of TC, 66.66% of E. faecalis and 35% of Salmonella spp. were multi-resistant.