Aims: The broad range antibiotic resistance of Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus) is a significant global threat to treatment of health care and community-associated infections. This study was aimed the prevalence of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and the antibiotic susceptibility pattern of S. aureus isolates in tertiary care hospitals in Bangalore, India from June 2012 to February 2013.
Methods: Standard methods were used to identify S. aureus from 100 clinical swab samples (45 wounds, 33 nasopharyngeal, and 22 high vaginal swabs), and the Kirby-Bauer disk diffusion method was used to investigate their antibiotic resistance patterns.
Results: Among the 100 samples, 45 (45%) were positive for S. aureus, including 15 high vaginal swab specimens, 16 wound swab specimens, and 14 nasopharyngeal swab samples. All S. aureus isolates were screened for methicillin resistance using the cefoxitin disk diffusion test and were confirmed by conventional PCR. The MRSA were resistant to both amoxicillin and ampicillin (100% of isolates), kanamycin (89.6%), ciprofloxacin (72.4%), cotrimoxazole (65.5%), chloramphenicol (44.8%), and gentamicin (55.1%). Only 3.4% of MRSA isolates were resistant to linezolid.
Conclusion: The results indicate a problematic prevalence of MRSA and multidrug-resistant MRSA in Bangalore hospitals. Linezolid is recommended as the drug of choice for treatment of MRSA infections in these settings.

We gratefully acknowledge Bangalore City College for providing laboratory facilities for this work.