Abstract
BackgroundThe epidemiology of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) isolated in horse infections is not well documented, especially in France. The aim of the study was to evaluate the prevalence of MRSA isolates in horse infections from 2007 to 2013 in France and to characterize phenotypically and genotypically this collection.ResultsOut of 1393 S. aureus horse isolates, 85 (6.1%) were confirmed to be MRSA. Interestingly, the prevalence of MRSA significantly increased from 2007–2009 to 2010–2013 (0.7 vs. 9.5%, P <0.0001). Resistance to methicillin was due to the presence of the mecA gene in 84 strains (98.8%) while one strain (1.2%) possessed the mecC gene. The vast majority of the strains (83/85, 97.6%) was resistant to at least three different classes of antibiotics. Multi-locus sequence typing (MLST) showed that MRSA strains belonged mainly since not all belong to two sequence types (STs): ST398 (53/85, 62.4%) and ST8 (28/85, 32.9%). It is worth to note that all ST398 MRSA isolates were detected in the period 2010–2013. Other molecular typing methods were also used, such SCCmec analysis, spa typing and rep-PCR (Diversilab, bioMérieux). All these four techniques were in good agreement, with spa typing and rep-PCR being more discriminative than MLST and SCCmec typing.ConclusionsThis study is the first epidemiological study in France with extensive characterization of MRSA isolates associated with horse infections in stud farms. It shows that there is a significant increase of MRSA prevalence between 2007 and 2013, which mainly results from the spread of ST398 clones. It also highlights the importance of horses as a potential reservoir of important antimicrobial resistance genes.
Highlights
The epidemiology of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) isolated in horse infections is not well documented, especially in France
LA-MRSA ST398 is generally susceptible to antibiotics other than β-lactams even if it is characteristically resistant to tetracyclines [6]
Note that MRSA isolates were collected from 56 different stud farms located in 24 different French departments (1 to 24 strains by department), mainly representing the Northwestern parts of France (Fig. 1)
Summary
The epidemiology of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) isolated in horse infections is not well documented, especially in France. The aim of the study was to evaluate the prevalence of MRSA isolates in horse infections from 2007 to 2013 in France and to characterize phenotypically and genotypically this collection. Reported as a major cause of hospital-acquired infections in humans, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) has increasingly been reported as responsible for community-acquired infections as well as for infections in animals. LA-MRSA ST398 can be responsible for infections in humans in close contact with animals. From an epidemiological point of view, the prevalence of MRSA in horse infections has been poorly investigated in France [7, 10] and most importantly there is no data on nationwide molecular epidemiology
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