Antimicrobial Susceptibility of Staphylococcus aureus isolated in Nursing and Medical students

This study aims to evaluate the occurrence of asymptomatic carriers and the antimicrobial susceptibility profile to mupirocin, oxacillin and vancomycin of Staphylococcus aureus isolated in undergraduate students from the first and last period of the Nursing and Medicine courses at EMESCAM. The methods used were nasal swab specimens collected in 147 academics, seeded in hypertonic mannitol agar and biochemical tests were performed to identify S. aureus. Antimicrobial susceptibility testing was performed using the disc-diffusion methodology and the susceptibility of vancomycin was confirmed by the Vitek 2® automated method. The results indicated that of the 147 samples collected, 61 (41.5%) were positive for S. aureus. Among Nursing students, 11 participants (34.4%) were carriers of S. aureus and no MRSA strain was found. Among medical students, 50 (43.5%) were positive, with 6.6% of MRSA lines. No resistance to mupirocin or vancomycin was found in the studied samples.