Metallo β- lactamase producing pseudomonas aeruginosa: a worrisome situation to handle

Pseudomonas aeruginosa is ubiquitous and very commonly found in hospital settings. In individuals with weakened immune systems, it can cause a number of ailments, inclusive of lung pneumoniae, gastrointestinal infections, keratitis, otitis media, and bacteremia. It is multi drug–resistant organism which is a worrisome situation. Multi-drug resistance is due to various factors like enzyme production, target mutation, expression of aminoglycoside-modifying enzymes (acetyltransferases, phosphotransferases) mediating aminoglycoside resistance, biofilm formation, but, among all of these, carbapenemases being one of most clinically significant. The most clinically significant carbapenemases are the Metallo β-lactamases (IMP, VIM, SPM, NDM, AIM and GIM genes). Understanding the epidemiology, resistance mechanism, molecular features, and for infection management and to prevent a potential global health crisis, techniques for identifying Carbapenem-Resistant-Pseudomonas aeruginosa (CRPA) are essential. For this review article, initial peer-review of publications from the various search engines (‘Google search engine’, ‘Science direct’, ‘Pubmed’, ‘Google Scholar’, ‘Cross references’ and ‘Scopus’) yielded a total of 97 papers. After reviewing the abstracts of the papers, 37 were eliminated and 60 were retained. Full text reading was undertaken to assess the quality of the articles, which resulted in the exclusion of 39 publications. After final peer-review screening, 17 publications were included in the study.