A total of 747 Shigella isolates were collected from hospitals in Jiangsu Province of China. Susceptibilities to antimicrobials and integrons were tested. A total of 78.3% of S. flexneri isolates and a total of 74.3% S. sonei isolates were resistant to at least three antibiotics. Of the Shigella isolates, 74.7% had integron I and 82.6% had integron II. The conjunction of the high prevalence of integrons in Shigella and high resistance to antimicrobials will lead to rapid dissemination of resistant genes in this region. Bacterial diarrhea caused by Shigella remains a considerable public health problem in the world, especially in developing countries, where the disease may cause as many as 167 million episodes of diarrhea and over a million deaths annually (1). The surveillance of shigellosis studies from multicenters showed that shigellosis was more ubiquitous than previously thought (2). In China, it was estimated that over 800 million diarrhea episodes occurred annually (3), and Shigella is one of the principal etiologic organisms for diarrhea (4). Shigella species are classified by four serogroups, including S. dysenteriae, S. flexneri, S. boydii, and S. sonnei. Of them, S. flexneri is the predominant species in most of developing countries (2, 5). Antibiotic therapy can limit the duration of shigellosis and shedding of the organism. However, resistance to the most often administered antibiotics has been increasing (5-7). The evidence from Hebei Province of China, Kuwait, and the United States showed that China has a far higher prevalence of resistance for all the bacteria studied (8).Integrons play an important role in the dissemination and recombination of antimicrobial drug resistance genes (9). They are common in Salmonella enterica and make an important contribution to the extent of antimicrobial resistance in this species (10,11). Recent studies also showed that integrons contributed to the spread of antimicrobial drug resistance genes among shigellosis cases (12). However, there are few data available to describe the prevalence of integrons of Shigella spp. circulating in China.In this study, we collected a total of 747 clinical Shigella isolates from the hospitals located in Jiangsu Province of China between January 2008 and November 2010. Stool specimens from patients with either diarrhea or dysentery were collected before the patients received antibiotics therapy and were then screened for Shigella spp. by conventional biochemical methods in local hospitals. The ages of patients ranged from 1 to 88 years. We defined diarrhea as the passage of Ն3 watery stools in a 24-h period. All isolates were identified using Rapid ID32E strips (bioMérieux Corp., Singapore) on an automatic biochemistry analyzer (Hitachi 917; Boehringer Mannheim, Japan) again. O and H antigens were characterized by slide agglutination with hyperimmune sera (Ningbo Tianrong Bio-pharmaceutical Company Limited), and the serotype was assigned to the Kauffmann-White scheme. Of these Shigella isolates, 716 were identified as Shigella; 491...
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