Antimicrobial Susceptibility and Genomic Profiles of Multidrug-Resistant <i>Staphylococcus aureus</i> from Nasopharynx of Asymptomatic Children in Dhaka, Bangladesh

Abstract

Children carrying Staphylococcus aureus in their nasopharynx are at a higher risk of contracting systemic infection. Due to lack of sufficient information regarding such carriage, this study was conducted to explore the prevalence, antibiotic susceptibility, and genomic profiles of S. aureus isolated from nasopharyngeal samples of 163 randomly selected asymptomatic Bangladeshi children aged from 5–p = 0.002) and influenza (p = 0.004). Among the isolates, 84.1% were multidrug-resistant and 47.5% (n = 40) were methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA). All the isolates (100%) were resistant to cefixime with higher resistance to ampicillin (95.5%) and penicillin (90.9%). Among the three investigated isolates, two were ST80 (ID-1 and ID-52) and one was a novel strain (ID-19) with the presence of aph-Stph, blaI, blaZ, dha1, fosB, lmrS, mepA, norA, and tet38 genes. The current research demonstrates a high incidence of multidrug-resistant S. aureus and reports the first instance of ST80 in asymptomatic children in Bangladesh.

Keywords

• nasopharyngeal samples
• <i>S. aureus</i>
• methicillin-resistant <i>S. aureus</i>
• multidrug-resistant
• ST80
• antimicrobial resistance genes