Evaluation of Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus Carriage and High Livestock Production Areas in North Carolina through Active Case Finding at a Tertiary Care Hospital

ECU Author/Contributor (non-ECU co-authors, if there are any, appear on document)

Beth J.,Augustino,Kerri L.,Curriero,Frank C.,Udani,Para Feingold (Creator)

Institution

East Carolina University (ECU )

Web Site: http://www.ecu.edu/lib/

Abstract: : Recent reports from the Netherlands document the emergence of novel multilocus sequencetyping (MLST) types (e.g., ST-398) of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) in livestock,particularly swine. In Eastern North Carolina (NC), one of the densest pig farming areas in the UnitedStates, as many as 14% of MRSA isolates from active case finding in our medical center have nomatches in a repetitive sequence-based polymerase chain reaction (rep-PCR) library. The currentstudy was designed to determine if these non-matched MRSA (NM-MRSA) were geographicallyassociated with exposure to pig farming in Eastern NC. While residential proximity to farm wastelagoons lacked association with NM-MRSA in a logistic regression model, a spatial cluster wasidentified in the county with highest pig density. Using MLST, we found a heterogeneous distributionof strain types comprising the NM-MRSA isolates from the most pig dense regions, including ST-5and ST-398. Our study raises the warning that patients in Eastern NC harbor livestock associatedMRSA strains are not easily identifiable by rep-PCR. Future MRSA studies in livestock dense areas inthe U.S. should investigate further the role of pig--human interactions.

Additional Information

Publication

Other

Language: English

Date: 2019

Keywords

MRSA; MLST; rep-PCR; North Carolina; livestock; cluster detection

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