Isolation of Bacteria from Constantly used Face Masks on Some Novena University Students

Bacteria entail an extremely diverse and wide group of organisms, capable of living in ubiquitous environmental niche. Since the onset of the covid 19 pandemic, face masks are being used by people to prevent the spread of the disease. However, once these face masks are constantly used without discarding, they serve as means for the spread of bacteria. The aim of the study was to isolate and characterize bacteria from constantly used face masks of some Novena University students. Thirty samples were collected using sterile swabstick randomly from (15 males and 15 females) students and standard microbiological methods were employed for the analysis. The swabs were cultured on a different media in order to determine the bacteria on the constantly used face masks. Out of the 30 samples 16 (55.82%) were contaminated with bacteria. The bacteria isolated were: Staphylococcus specie 8 (23.56%), Escherichia coli 4 (17.3%) , Peptococcus specie 3 (9.44%) and  Pseudomonas aeruginosa 1(1.3%). Subjecting these isolates to natural and synthetic antibiotics reveals that Manihot esculenta and Heliantus plant extract were highly sensitive to the isolates compared to Gentamycin, Rocephin, Ciprofloxacin and Erythromycin. It is recommended that good hygiene should be observed by students to avoid the spread of the pathogen from constantly used face masks.

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Not applicable

The datasets used in this study are openly available at [repository link] and the source code is available on GitHub at [GitHub link].

This work did not receive any external funding.