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JAC Advance Access originally published online on February 24, 2009
Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy 2009 63(5):868-872; doi:10.1093/jac/dkp045
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Society for Antimicrobial Chemotherapy. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Original research

Spread without known selective pressure of a vancomycin-resistant clone of Enterococcus faecium among broilers

O. Nilsson1,*, C. Greko1, J. Top2, A. Franklin1 and B. Bengtsson1

1 National Veterinary Institute, Uppsala, Sweden 2 University Medical Center, Utrecht, The Netherlands

Received 14 November 2008; returned 12 December 2008; revised 29 January 2009; accepted 30 January 2009

* Corresponding author. Tel: +46-18-67-44-92; Fax: +46-18-30-91-62; E-mail: oskar.nilsson{at}sva.se

Objectives: The aim of this paper was to describe an increased occurrence of vancomycin-resistant enterococci (VRE) in Swedish broilers since 2000 and to investigate the genetic relatedness of isolates.

Methods: Caecal content from slaughtered broilers was cultured for VRE on medium supplemented with vancomycin (16 mg/L). Species identification, antibiotic susceptibility determination, vancomycin resistance genotyping, multilocus sequence typing (MLST) and characterization of Tn1546 were performed.

Results: The proportion of VRE-positive samples increased gradually from <1% in 2000 to slightly over 40% in 2005. Between 2005 and 2006, the proportion of VRE-positive samples decreased and between 2006 and 2007, it was stable at just below 30%. All isolates tested were Enterococcus faecium and carried the vanA gene. A majority of the isolates had similar antibiograms, the same MLST sequence type and Tn1546 transposon.

Conclusions: The proportion of VRE-positive samples from broilers has increased since 2000, and this is due to the spread of one major clone. Moreover, this has taken place in an environment without any obvious selective pressure.

Keywords: epidemiology , MLST , vanA


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