The effect of a combined choline salicylate and cetalkonium chloride gel on particular strains of Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Staphylococcus spp. and Streptococcus spp.

The ongoing control of virulent bacteria strains is a challenge for today’s medicine. An example of this, is one widely used drug employed in treating less serious external oral and ocular bacterial infections. This is a gel containing both cetalkonium chloride and choline salicylate. However, whether in the era of expanding bacterial resistance this gel is still effective, is not clear. Hence, in our work, its antibacterial effect was studied against 13 strains of Pseudomonas aeruginosa, 6 strains of Staphylococcus spp. and 6 strains of Streptococcus spp. drawn from the collection of the Department of Microbiology, Virology and Immunology, Kazakh National Medical University, as well as against 30 strains of Staphylococcus spp. recently isolated from Kazakh medical students. This work demonstrated that Pseudomonas aeruginosa was insensitive to this preparation in all samples, while the sensitivity of Staphylococcus spp. and Streptococcus spp. was almost halved, compared to untreated samples. An interesting discovery was the greater resistance of strains obtained from student volunteers than from the collection. However, despite the evident resistance of some strains to the combined cetalkonium chloride and choline salicylate gel, we put forward that it can still be used in less serious external bacterial infections.