• DOI:10.20546/IJCMAS.2017.608.430
• Corpus ID: 43644924

Isolation and Identification of Bacteria from under Fingernails

@article{Risan2017IsolationAI,
  title={Isolation and Identification of Bacteria from under Fingernails},
  author={Mohsen Hashim Risan},
  journal={International Journal of Current Microbiology and Applied Sciences},
  year={2017},
  volume={6},
  pages={3584-3590}
}

• M. Risan
• Published 20 August 2017
• Medicine, Biology
• International Journal of Current Microbiology and Applied Sciences

Foodborne diseases are known to contribute to both human morbidity and mortality as well as health care costs. Besides outbreaks of foodborne disease, health care costs associated with these outbreaks are enormous (Bean et al., 1996; Campbell et al., 1998). The human body surface is constantly in contact with environmental microorganisms and become readily colonized by certain microbial species, Gram-negative and Grampositive pathogens in clinical specimens. It can cause a variety of communityor hospital-acquired infections, including those of the urinary tract, respiratory tract, wounds and burns, bacteriaemia, neonatal meningoencephalitis, empyema and osteomyelitis. The hand serves as a major vehicle of transmission of various microbes, including the enteric species (Prescott et al., 2005). Various infections via hands and fingernails. Contaminated of hands play a major role in faecal-oral transmission of diseases (Ray et al., 2011). The unhygienic habits of most of the people lead to the various infections via hands and fingernails. 80% of the diseases are associated with the poor domestic and personal hygiene. One of the ways of healthy living is hand hygiene (Patel et al., 2010). Faecal contamination of hands is one of the important route by which This study was conducted to isolate and identify bacteria contaminants of under nails (long nails). The samples were collected randomly from 20 samples under nails (belonging to volunteers for sampling). This study was conducted between October to December, 2016 at College of Biotechnology, Al-Nahrain University. The isolated colonies were then sub cultured in nutrient agar and slants in order to obtain pure culture of all colonies. All students (100%) found to harbour bacteria on their under nails. Bacterial pathogens isolated from the under nails of students include Staphylococcus aureus (5 isolates), Bacillus cereus (2 isolates), Acinetobacter spp (1 isolates), Bacillus spp (7 isolates), Streptococcus spp (1 isolates), Pseudomonas aeruginosa (6 isolates), Klebsiella spp (2 isolates) and Unknown (2 isolates). Highest contamination of Bacillus spp was isolated. Showed Percentage of bacterial isolates from the samples collected from under nails after calculating the total percentage of each isolate Staphylococcus aureus 19.23%, Bacillus cereus 7.69%, Acinetobacter spp 3.84%, Bacillus spp 26.92%, Streptococcus spp 3.84%, Pseudomonas aeruginosa 23.07%, Klebsiella spp 7.69% and Unknown 7.69%. The highest prevalence were in male were (16 isolates) and were percentage of bacteria isolated 61.53% while in female were (10 isolates) and percentage of bacteria isolated 38.46%. Also showed results Percentage of total bacteria isolated of female and male, were 38.46% and 61.53 % respectively. K e y w o r d s