Phenotype and Molecular Characterization of Antibiotic Resistance of Salmonella spp. from Cattle in Abidjan District, Côte d'Ivoire

Aims: The overall objective of this study was to study antibiotic-resistant strains of Salmonella in livestock sales sites in the Abidjan district.

Place and Duration of Study: Researchers team from Institute Pasteur of Ivory Coast and their students collected samples of cattle feces in five townships of the district of Abidjan from April to September 2016.

Methodology: Fresh cow dung has been collected from sales outlets and livestock pens in five municipalities in Abidjan. The prevalence of Salmonella carrying has been studied by classical microbiological techniques. These included strain isolation by culture on the Hektoen medium, biochemical identification using Leminor's reduced rack and strain confirmation by MALDI-TOF MS. Phenotypic determination of antibiotic resistance and detection their genes were carried out respectively by the method of discs diffusion on the Muller-Hinton agar and using PCR simplex.

Results: In this study, we collected 420 samples.

The results showed that the overall prevalence of Salmonella isolated from cattle feceswas 20% (84/420). Twenty-six (26) strains were resistant to at least one antibiotic. The blaCTX-M, blaSHV, blaTEM and TetA resistance genes were detected with the respective frequencies of 7.7%, 57.7% and 7.7%.

Conclusion: The isolation of antibiotic-resistant Salmonella strains in these healthy cattle poses a significant threat to public health. However, a good use of antibiotics in farms could help limit the phenomenon of resistance of Salmonella to antibiotics.