Short communicationHigh prevalence of closely-related Acinetobacter baumannii in pets according to a multicentre study in veterinary clinics, Reunion Island
Introduction
Acinetobacter baumannii (AB) has emerged over the last decade as a cause of healthcare-associated infections. Its clinical significance has been propelled by its remarkable ability to upregulate or acquire resistance determinant, making it one of the organisms threatening the current antibiotic era (Peleg et al., 2008, Higgins et al., 2010, Kempf and Rolain, 2012). The cross-transmission of this organism from patients to patients generating outbreaks, particularly in intensive care units and the possibilities of outbreak extension by patient transfers have been demonstrated (Naas et al., 2006, Giamarellou et al., 2008). In addition during the last decade, a lot of studies have reported the emergence of AB as an organism responsible for community-acquired infections, especially in tropical areas (Eveillard et al., 2013).
Reunion Island (RI) is a French territory located in the western Indian Ocean. Hospital-based retrospective data have demonstrated that AB is regularly isolated from clinical or screening samples obtained from patients within the 48 h following hospitalization in RI. Those data tend to indicate the existence of a human extra-hospital AB reservoir in RI. This carriage can be due to AB isolates acquired during a preceding hospitalization, but some other hypotheses can be proposed. One of them is an AB acquisition from an animal reservoir. In several studies conducted previously in veterinary clinics (VC), AB have been isolated in pets from clinical samples (Francey et al., 2000, Endimiani et al., 2011, Hamouda et al., 2011, Zordan et al., 2011). Our objective was to study the AB reservoir in pets in RI.
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Materials and methods
A multicentre cross-sectional study was conducted in October 2012. All cats and dogs present on one day in 9 veterinary clinics (VC) (30% of all VC in RI) were sampled by swabbing rectum, mouth and wounds if applicable. All swabs were inoculated in 2 agar media: the UTI chromogenic agar medium (UTI, Oxoid, Basingstoke, UK) and the ESBL agar medium (AES, France), a selective medium for gram-negative bacilli resistant to third-generation cephalosporins. Bacterial identifications were performed
Results
Overall, 138 animals were sampled and 9 carriers (2 cats and 7 dogs) were identified from 4 VC. According to our methods of screening, cultivating and identifying, the prevalence of AB carriage was 6.5% (CI95%; 2.4, 10.6). Eight isolates had the same susceptibility pattern to antibiotics: they were susceptible to ticarcillin, carbapenems, aminoglycosides, rifampicin, and resistant to ciprofloxacine and cotrimoxazole. The other isolate was susceptible to all those antibiotics (Table 1).
The PFGE
Discussion
Today, increased attention is devoted to companion animal welfare, resulting in increased expenditure on veterinary care and prevention and therapy of infectious diseases. This situation is associated with a frequent use of antimicrobial agents in pet animals, may result in some laxity in antimicrobial prescription, and therefore can lead to inappropriate use of antimicrobial agents. It is well established that pet animals can be reservoirs of antimicrobial-resistant bacteria (Guardabassi et
Acknowledgements
We are very grateful to H. Lotteau, P. Legendre, G. Holzapfel, P. Melot, T. Lostfelt, L. Venturini, D. Plazanet, I. Lemercier, K. Teppe, and W. Severin for their participation to the study by sampling animals in their veterinary clinic.
A part of the results of this study was presented at the 9th International Symposium on the Biology of Acinetobacter, Cologne 2013, oral presentation O5-4.
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