ABSTRACT

Antibiotic resistance is considered as a growing a threat to humans, animal and environmental health. The antibiotics resistance profile of bacteria isolated from cattle dung compost were investigated in this study. Windrow method was adopted for the cow dung composting while the isolation of bacteria was carried out by pour plate technique and the identification of the isolates were done using standard biochemical methods. The total heterotrophic showed that the highest count of 1.2 x 10⁶ CFU/g was obtained at day 0 and the the least count of  6.5. x 10⁶ CFU/g was obtained at day 6. The biochemical and morphological characteristics of isolates revealed that bacteria of the following genera were isolated Bacillus, Klebsiella, Enterobacter,Pseudomonas and Proteus and Micrococcus. The percentage occurrence of bacteria isolated from cow dung compost sample showed that Bacillus spp. 25% had the highest percentage occurrence followed by Klebsiella spp 20% while Pseudomonas aeruginosa 7.5% had the least percentage occurrence.The resistance pattern of bacteria to tested antibiotics reveled that Pseudomonas aeruginosas was 100 % resistant to Augmentin and cefuroxime.The result of this study indicates that cow dung compost is a harbours antibiotics resistant bacteria which is a threat to human, animal and environmental health. Therefore it is important to reduce the load of antibiotic resistant bacteria that end up in the soil.