Abstract
ABSTRACTEleven laboratories collaborated to determine the periodic prevalence of Salmonella in a population of dogs and cats in the United States visiting veterinary clinics. Fecal samples (2,965) solicited from 11 geographically dispersed veterinary testing laboratories were collected in 36 states between January 2012 and April 2014 and tested using a harmonized method. The overall study prevalence of Salmonella in cats (3 of 542) was <1%. The prevalence in dogs (60 of 2,422) was 2.5%. Diarrhea was present in only 55% of positive dogs; however, 3.8% of the all diarrheic dogs were positive, compared with 1.8% of the nondiarrheic dogs. Salmonella-positive dogs were significantly more likely to have consumed raw food (P = 0.01), to have consumed probiotics (P = 0.002), or to have been given antibiotics (P = 0.01). Rural dogs were also more likely to be Salmonella positive than urban (P = 0.002) or suburban (P = 0.001) dogs. In the 67 isolates, 27 unique serovars were identified, with three dogs having two serovars present. Antimicrobial susceptibility testing of 66 isolates revealed that only four of the isolates were resistant to one or more antibiotics. Additional characterization of the 66 isolates was done using pulsed-field gel electrophoresis and whole-genome sequencing (WGS). Sequence data compared well to resistance phenotypic data and were submitted to the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). This study suggests an overall decline in prevalence of Salmonella-positive dogs and cats over the last decades and identifies consumption of raw food as a major risk factor for Salmonella infection. Of note is that almost half of the Salmonella-positive animals were clinically nondiarrheic.
Highlights
Eleven laboratories collaborated to determine the periodic prevalence of Salmonella in a population of dogs and cats in the United States visiting veterinary clinics
In the study we report here, 11 different diagnostic laboratories located in multiple sites across the United States cultured fecal samples from diarrheic and nondiarrheic dogs and cats for Salmonella by using harmonized
Results of the proficiency tests (PTs) using Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium isolated from dog fecal samples for the inoculum indicated that the laboratories using the Collaborative Laboratory Agreement Salmonella Project (V-CLASP) method performed as well or better than laboratories using other methods
Summary
Eleven laboratories collaborated to determine the periodic prevalence of Salmonella in a population of dogs and cats in the United States visiting veterinary clinics. Collaborative Study of Salmonella Prevalence in Pets decline in prevalence of Salmonella-positive dogs and cats over the last decades and identifies consumption of raw food as a major risk factor for Salmonella infection. In the United States, between January 2012 and December 2015, there were more than 70 recalls of animal food or treats due to Salmonella contamination (http://www.fda.gov/Safety/Recalls/). In over a third of the studies, the prevalence of Salmonella-positive dogs was below 3%. The authors of that study noted that the highest prevalence occurred in mongrel dogs, which were more likely to roam free, scavenge, and be fed raw food
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