Abstract
The increasing prevalence of oxyimino-cephalosporin-resistant Enterobacteriaceae has become a global concern because of their clinical impact on both human and veterinary medicine. The present study determined the prevalence, antimicrobial susceptibility, and molecular genetic features of extended-spectrum β-lactamase (ESBL)-producing Escherichia coli (ESBL-EC) isolates from raw vegetables. A total of 1324 samples were collected from two agricultural wholesale markets in Incheon, South Korea in 2018. The ESBL-EC strains were isolated from 0.83% (11/1324) samples, and all of them were resistant to ampicillin, piperacillin, cefazoline, cefotaxime, and nalidixic acid and yielded CTX-M-type ESBL, including CTX-M-14, CTX-M-15, CTX-M-55, CTX-M-27, and CTX-M-65. The isolates belonged to phylogenetic subgroups D (n = 5), A (n = 4), and B1 (n = 2). Multilocus sequence typing revealed nine known E. coli sequence types (STs), including ST10, ST38, ST69, ST101, ST224, ST349, ST354, ST2509, ST2847, and two new STs. Notably, ST69, ST10, ST38, and ST354 belong to the major human-associated extraintestinal pathogenic E. coli lineages. Our results demonstrate that ESBL-producing multidrug-resistant pathogens may be transmitted to humans through the vegetable intake, highlighting the importance of resistance monitoring and intervention in the One Health perspective.
Highlights
The increasing prevalence of oxyimino-cephalosporin-resistant Enterobacteriaceae has become a global concern because of their clinical impact on both human and veterinary medicine
Among 1324 raw vegetable samples, a total of 11 nonduplicate cefotaxime-resistant ESBL-E. coli (EC) were recovered from the stem (5/170, 2.94%) and leafy (6/879, 0.68%) vegetables (Fig. 1 and Table 1)
No ESBL-ECs were isolated from the fruit and root types of vegetables
Summary
The increasing prevalence of oxyimino-cephalosporin-resistant Enterobacteriaceae has become a global concern because of their clinical impact on both human and veterinary medicine. The present study determined the prevalence, antimicrobial susceptibility, and molecular genetic features of extended-spectrum β-lactamase (ESBL)-producing Escherichia coli (ESBL-EC) isolates from raw vegetables. In South Korea, many studies have been reported on ESBL-producing Escherichia coli strains (ESBL-ECs) in hospital and community settings since the first identification of CTX-M-14 in clinical isolates of E. coli, Shigella sonnei, and Klebsiella pneumoniae in 2 0013. It has been reported that animals can be a primary reservoir of ESBL-ECs17 and that foods may play a role in the dissemination of resistance to humans through the food chain[18,19,20] For this reason, several developed countries have implemented antimicrobial resistance monitoring programs for food products, as well as in humans and animals based on the One Health a pproach[21]. We investigated the prevalence, antimicrobial susceptibilities, responsible genes, and clonal lineages of ESBL-ECs isolated from raw vegetables in South Korea according to a nationwide surveillance program
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