What is behind phylogenetic analysis of hospital-, community- and livestock-associated methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus?

Abstract

Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) has been shown to be the predominant life-threatening pathogen in Egypt. MRSA is a major cause of severe healthcare-associated (HA) infections. During the last decades, the incidence of community-associated (CA) MRSA infections has a complex epidemiology arising from the circulation of different strains in the general population. Moreover, livestock-associated (LA) MRSA emerged recently becomes an emerging threat to public health. Therefore, it is important to illuminate the differences between CA-, HA- and LA-MRSA to shed light on their genetic diversity and evolution. This study presents the first data on analysing the correlation between CA-, LA- and HA-MRSA using antibiogram typing, molecular characteristics and antimicrobial resistance and virulence genes' profiles. Overall, HA-MRSA strains tended to be multidrug resistant and less virulent than both LA- and CA-MRSA strains. Importantly, CA-MRSA strains had a high homology with each of HA- and LA-MRSA. However, no similarity was observed between HA- and LA-MRSA. Our findings suggest that the epidemiological changes in genetic behaviour between HA- and LA-MRSA are due to the presence of CA-MRSA confirming that CA-MRSA has created a public health crisis worldwide.

Keywords: antimicrobial resistance; epidemiology; genetic diversity; methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus; virulence profile.