Ocorrência e suscetibilidade antimicrobiana de Campylobacter spp. em cães, gatos, crianças e sua importância zoonótica

Abstract

The Campylobacter species are the etiologic agents incriminated in most cases of human gastroenteritis. The main way of human infection is the consumption of animal risen food and contaminated water, but studies are required to better understand the epidemiology and risk factors for the infection of humans and animals by these organisms. They have been collected and analyzed for the presence of Campylobacter spp., faeces samples from 160 children under five years old and 120 samples from pets (103 dogs and 17 cats) met at the Clinical Hospital and Veterinary Hospital, respectively, at Federal University of Uberlândia. The positivity was 6.87% among the human samples and 18.3% among the animal samples, with 100% of agreement between the results obtained through phenotypic and genotypic methods. From the 33 positive faeces samples for Campylobacter spp., 57.6% were identified as C. jejuni (fifteen from dogs and four from children), 33.4% as C. coli (four from dogs, two from cats and five from children) and 9% as Campylobacter gracilis (one from dog and two from children). The most prevalent biotype was C. jejuni biotype I, with 13 isolated samples, followed by C. coli biotype I with 11 isolated ones. There was resistance from more than 50% of the strains isolated from dogs to ceftiofur, sulfazotrim, norfloxacin and tetracycline. Among the strains isolated from humans samples could be headlined the resistance to amoxicillin, cefazolin, ceftiofur, erythromycin, and norfloxacin. There were no differences in resistance profile between the species C. coli and C. jejuni (p> 0.05). The PCR technique showed that among 19 isolated strains of C. jejuni, 12 had between two and four of the virulence genes: flaA, pdlA, cadF or ciaB. Among the isolated strains from canine, one of them has shown the four genes simultaneously, two strains had three genes and two of them had one gene, all the others had two genes. Among the isolated strains from human faeces, all of them had the flaA and cadF genes, only one sample contained the pdlA gene and two of the strains had the ciaB gene. All the strains that showed the virulence genes have been isolated from faeces of animals or children with diarrhea. It was observed a high rate of resistance to sulfazotrim in isolated sample from dogs and cats, with values of 66.7% and 100% respectively. Among the children isolated samples the most troubling resistance values were found to erythromycin and norfloxacin. This data demonstrates the need to follow the use of antimicrobials as they are the drug of choice for gastroenteritis treatment in animals and campylobacteriosis in humans, respectively. The association of risk factors and infection of Campylobacter spp. in children demonstrated: an increase of 3.57 times probability to have diarrhea, 0.49 times more, when in contact with pets and 1.4 times more, during an antibiotic therapy, but in all of them there was no statistical significance (p> 0.05 ). When the same associations were created for dogs, the odds increased 7.38 times for the presence of diarrhea and 57.41 more chances when on antibiotic use (p <0.05). The presence of the four virulence genes in dogs isolated strains increased by 18.33 times the probability of the animal get diarrhea (p <0.05). Although, in this study, there has been no positive association between contact with pets and children infected by Campylobacter spp., further investigation should be made such as it must be established the epidemiological relationship by molecular methods for isolated strains from human and animal infections.