OCCURRENCE OF PSEUDOMONAS SPECIES IN URINARY TRACT INFECTION

OCCURRENCE OF PSEUDOMONAS SPECIES  IN URINARY TRACT INFECTION  
CHAPTER ONE


1.1 INTRODUCTION/ LITERATURE REVIEW 

URINARY TRACT INFECTION (UTI)


Urinary tract infection (UTI) is the term used to describe microbial colonization of the urinary tract and tissue invasion of any organ of the urinary tract by microorganisms. Among the microbial
colonizers, bacteria are most commonly responsible, although fungi and viruses are occasionally involved.

The urinary tract is essentially a collecting discharging system.

The urinary system of man naturally includes the kidneys, ureters, bladders, and urethra. Infections in any of these anatomical sites would constitute UTI. The urinary system may be divided into the
upper and lower tracts. On this basis, the infections maybe categorized into two areas of involvement:


Cystitis (bladder infection) and pyelonephritis (kidney infections) (Anderson, 1999). Urinary tract infection is a major human problem and it is one of the most common type of infection faced by women simply because of the short urethra (5cm) in females making them morereadily traversed by microorganisms unlike in males, the anatomicallength of the urethra (20cm) provides a distance barrier that excludes microorganisms; this explains why general urinary tract infections are 114 times more common in females than in males. It could be symptomatic whereby symptoms are not obvious and only found on routine examination. More commonly, urinary tract infections induces symptoms which causes patients to seek medical advise.


This infection is diagnostic because of their ability to produce serious renal disease (Pyelonephritis) and can be a source of spread of infection to the blood stream. The presence of bacteria in the urine
is called bacteriuria (stamm and Horton, 1993).

However, bacteria maybe completely asymptomatic or remain localized to the bladder without the development of renal infection. Urinary tract infections occur in persons of all stages in life but the
incidence varies with sex and age with particular impact on females and males at the two extremes of life.