Abstract
Resistance to carbapenems is a severe threat to human health. These last resort antimicrobials are indispensable for the treatment of severe human infections with multidrug-resistant Gram-negative bacteria. In accordance with their increasing medical impact, carbapenemase-producing Enterobacteriaceae (CPE) might be disseminated from colonized humans to non-human reservoirs (i.e., environment, animals, food). In Germany, the occurrence of CPE in livestock and food has been systematically monitored since 2016. In the 2019 monitoring, an OXA-48-producing E. coli (19-AB01443) was recovered from a fecal sample of a fattening pig. Phenotypic resistance was confirmed by broth microdilution and further characterized by PFGE, conjugation, and combined short-/long-read whole genome sequencing. This is the first detection of this resistance determinant in samples from German meat production. Molecular characterization and whole-genome sequencing revealed that the blaOXA-48 gene was located on a common pOXA-48 plasmid-prototype. This plasmid-type seems to be globally distributed among various bacterial species, but it was frequently associated with clinical Klebsiella spp. isolates. Currently, the route of introduction of this plasmid/isolate combination into the German pig production is unknown. We speculate that due to its strong correlation with human isolates a transmission from humans to livestock has occurred.
Highlights
Carbapenem resistance by the production of carbapenemases is increasingly reported from medical settings [1]
Broth microdilution showed that the recovered bacteria exhibited a non-wildtype phenotype for some beta-lactams, including the tested carbapenems
Further molecular characterization indicated that the phylogenetic group B1 isolate belonged to ST295 and harbored the blaOXA-48 gene on a 63,427 bp IncL/M plasmid
Summary
Carbapenem resistance by the production of carbapenemases is increasingly reported from medical settings [1]. OXA-48 is the most frequent carbapenemase in Germany [1]. In 2001, OXA-48 was detected in Turkey for the first time and subsequently reported from the Mediterranean and Western Europe in the following years [2,3,4,5]. Nowadays, this enzyme variant is globally disseminated [6]. The resistance is mediated by the blaOXA-48 gene, which was supposed to originate from the genus Shewanella [7]. The gene is typically located on a highly conserved plasmid-prototype (pOXA-48) carrying an IncL/M replicon [8]
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