Microbiological Profile of Infectious Keratitis in a Tertiary Care Hospital

Microbial keratitis is a major preventable cause of visual impairment. In developed countries viral infections are the leading cause of corneal ulcer whereas bacteria and fungi attributes to maximum number of cases in the developing countries. There is paucity of recent data, risk factors and demographic distribution of patients for all three leading etiological agents of keratitis. This study included all clinically diagnosed cases of infective keratitis from 01 Jan 2021 to 01 Jan 2022. In brief, four sets of corneal scrapings were taken from patients of infectious keratitis and processed for bacterial and fungal culture, microscopy and RTPCR of viral agents. It was observed that rural elderly males were the most predisposed to occurrence of infectious keratitis and trauma being the leading cause. Out of total 151 samples processed, 49(32%) samples were found to have definitive evidence of bacterial, fungal and viral pathogens. Fungi were found to be the most common 37 (24%) etiological agent leading to keratitis followed by bacterial 7(5%) and viral agents 5(3%). Clinical signs alone are not sufficient to diagnose infectious keratitis, the importance of microbiology in the identification of pathogen and aiming at definitive therapy of infectious keratitis helps in rescuing the eye from this reversible cause of blindness.