Abstract
Salmonella continues to be a major food and public health burden worldwide that can threaten human health via eating contaminated meats, particularly those originating from chicken. In this study, the antimicrobial resistance profiles, epidemiological characteristics of resistance genes, and pulsed field gel electrophoresis (PFGE-XbaI) typing of 120 non-Pullorum/Gallinarum Salmonella isolates recovered from chicken embryos in Henan province were determined. The antimicrobial resistant phenotypes and evaluation of the extended-spectrum beta-lactamases (ESBLs) producing strains of Salmonella were investigated by the Kirby–Bauer test and the double-disk synergy test. Additionally, 37 antimicrobial resistance genes encoding resistance to five different categories, including aminoglycosides, cephalosporins, sulphonamides, tetracyclines, and β-lactams, were examined by conventional PCR. However, genotyping analysis was conducted by macro-restriction using enzyme XbaI followed by the separation of the restricted DNA fragments by PFGE. The results of this study showed that the studied Salmonella strains were highly resistant to ampicillin (66.67%) and sulfisoxazole (66.67%), while they were all susceptible to meropenem, imipenem, colistin, and chloramphenicol. Additionally, 67.5% (81/120) of the studied strains were multidrug resistant, and 21.67% (26/120) were phenotypically confirmed as ESBLs positive. The statistical analysis showed that resistance depends on the serovars, and ESBLs positive strains showed more multi-resistance than ESBLs negative strains (p < 0.05). The genotypic antimicrobial resistance showed the detection of 14 among the 37 tested genes, and the concordance between genotypic and phenotypic antimicrobial resistance ranged from 0% to 100% depending on the serovars. However, the PFGE-XbaI typing results showed that the examined Salmonella strains were divided into 22 individual subtypes and were grouped in nine clusters, with similarity values ranging from 64.7% to 100%. From this study, we can conclude that the antimicrobial resistance of Salmonella serovars isolated from chicken embryos in Henan province was alarming, with rigorous multidrug resistance, which requires the urgent mitigation of the use of antimicrobial drugs in chicken hatcheries. Additionally, our results showed evidence of the presence of different PFGE patterns among the studied Salmonella serovars, suggesting the presence of different sources of contamination.
Highlights
The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 600 million people fall ill and that 420,000 people die each year after consuming contaminated food, while USD110 billion is lost each year in productivity and medical expenses resulting from unsafe food in low- and middle-income countries [1]
Our results showed that the studied isolates present high resistance to penicillins and sulphonamides and quite a high resistance to cephalosporins and quinolones, while they were all sensitive to carbapenems, polypeptides, and phenicols
(66.67% for each one), which was consistent with the results reported in other Chinese regions, including Shanghai (AMP: 50.7%; SIZ: 49.32%) [30], Sichuan (AMP: 87.8%) [37], Shandong (AMP: 97.7%) [38], and Guangdong (AMP: 31.8%; SIZ: 70.2%) [39], indicating that the Salmonella recovered from chickens had developed serious resistance to ampicillin and sulphonamides; the use of these drugs should be suspended
Summary
The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 600 million people fall ill and that 420,000 people die each year after consuming contaminated food, while USD110 billion is lost each year in productivity and medical expenses resulting from unsafe food in low- and middle-income countries [1]. Foodborne diseases hamper socioeconomic development via stressing health care systems and harm national economies, tourism, and trade [1]. In this regard, Salmonella is classified at the top of the list of major foodborne pathogens, affecting millions of people every year, and is of great importance to food and public health worldwide. In China, 70% to 80% of bacterial food poisonings were linked to Salmonella [2] This bacterium can directly threaten human health after eating contaminated foods, especially poultry meat, which appears to be one of the major sources of human infection [3,4,5]. Several studies have evaluated the prevalence of Salmonella in poultry products [4,5,6,7,8]
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