The recent incidence of multidrug resistance is alarming, and it is a major threat to poultry farmers and consumers of poultry meat and egg. The present study employed standard microbiological procedures to isolate Escherichia coli from a total of 50 poultry birds, further biochemical identification was done, and the susceptibility profile was determined using the modified Kirby-Bauer disc diffusion method. The results indicates that 90.9% of isolated Escherichia coli from poultry birds exhibit multidrug resistance to three or more drug-classes. Based on Antibiotic susceptibility testing, an extremely high resistance rates were observed for Augmentin 100%, Cefuroxime 95.50% and tetracycline 90.91% which could result from excessive antibiotics usage in poultry husbandry. An additional Multiple Antibiotic Resistance (MAR) index was determined which shows MAR indices greater than 0.2 indicating a high-risk source of contamination via antibiotic usage, no extreme MAR index values (>0.8) were detected in this study. The study present an increased MDR prevalence rate of E. coli to tested antibiotics. This suggest that, poultry products has an increased multidrug resistance due to the usage of essential antibiotics in poultry farming, which have resulted to an increased spread of microbial resistance and as such required urgent monitoring.
Key words: Multidrug resistance, Escherichia coli, susceptibility, MAR index, poultry birds, Rivers State, Nigeria
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