Parental Perceptions and Microbial / Public Health Implications of Pre-Chewed Weaning Foods
Year: 2013
Type: article
Abstract: Introduction of pre-chewed foods to infants during weaning is a common parental practice. However, children can be exposed to mouth-to-mouth transmission of infectious and multi-drug resistant bacteria through pre-chewed foods, during complementary feeding. The aim of this study was to investigate the antibiotic resistance profiles of 103 easily-culturable oral bacterial strains of nursing parents, isolated from their pre-chewed meat samples. Using agar disk-diffusion and modified agar well-diffusion methods, Bacillus, Clostridium, Staphylococcus and Streptococcus species exhibited total (100%) resistance against amoxicillin, augmentin, erythromycin, oxacillin and tetracycline antibiotic discs, while 7.1 - 100% resistance were exhibited by Enterobacter, Escherichia coli, Klebsiella, Morganella, Proteus, Salmonella, Shigella and Vibrio species. Significantly high resistance rates of 25.0-100% were generally exhibited by most of the bacterial flora against 30 oral paediatric antibiotic (ampicillins, cloxacillins, cotrimoxazoles, erythromycins, metronidazoles and trimethroprims) suspensions, with as high as ≥ 50.0% multiple antibiotic resistance (%MAR). Shigella flexneri and Streptococcus pneumoniae exhibited total (100%) resistance to 10 and 15 paediatric antibiotics respectively but the most-resisted paediatric antibiotics were brands of ampicillin and metronidazole. Only 4.9% of the bacterial strains exhibited %MAR of ≤ 10.0%, while none was totally susceptible to all the paediatric antibiotics. About 80.0% nursing subjects had earlier pre-chewed foods for infants; 25.8% felt nothing was wrong in pre-chewing foods, 12.2% were not sure of the implications of such feeding practice, while 62.0% knew that pre-chewing was wrong but did not know of alternative means of tendering certain foods like meat for infants' feeding. In conclusion, this study corroborated that pre-chewing foods could account for increase in parent-to-child transmissible oral / gastrointestinal infections. Furthermore, children can be exposed to multiple antibiotic resistant bacteria through pre-chewed foods during complementary feeding, which can lead to public health implications of treatment failure in paediatric clinical conditions.
Source: Food and public health
Language: English
Subfield: Microbiology (medical)
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W209658723