Salmonella Kentucky has two faces.
Attention, travelers: Some germs that cause Salmonella in Kentucky are not the kind of mementos you want to bring back from your vacation.
At Washington State University (WSU), scientists are attempting to determine why Salmonella Kentucky bugs obtained abroad have a higher propensity to spread illness and develop resistance to antibiotics than those obtained domestically.
According to a study done in the lab of Devendra Shah, an associate professor and the Caroline Engle Distinguished Professor in Research on Infectious Diseases at WSU, over 60% of Washingtonians who had a confirmed case of Salmonella Kentucky while traveling overseas between 2004 and 2014 were resistant to the class of antibiotics known as fluoroquinolones, which are used to treat Salmonella infections.
Additionally, the researchers gathered isolates of Salmonella Kentucky from chickens grown in the US, but none of them shown fluoroquinolone resistance. The bacteria, which are known to cause fever, diarrhea, and stomach pain in people, flourish in the digestive tracts of food animals like chickens and cattle.
Graduate student Rachel Soltys, the first author of an article on the topic published in the Journal of Frontiers and Sustainable Food Systems, said, “Quite frankly, I think we’ve just gotten lucky this drug-resistant type hasn’t popped up in the US yet.”
Fifteen clinical samples of Salmonella Kentucky that were obtained by the Washington State Department of Health and were resistant to fluoroquinolones were examined by Soltys and Shah. Eleven cases were linked directly to foreign travel to the Middle East, specifically to Tanzania, Ethiopia, the Ivory Coast, Morocco, Egypt, and India.
An additional 140 Salmonella Kentucky samples were gathered from chickens in the northwest of the country and from Jean Guard’s lab, an agriculture research scientist at the US Department of Agriculture’s National Poultry Research Center. Those illustrationswere compared with more than 400 publicly available genome sequences of Salmonella Kentucky from various parts of the world.
You may also like:
Food security in emerging nations: issues and remedies
Are drinks the secret to increasing cannabis use among consumers?
Managing the lack of labour for mushroom picking
“It was confirmed that the patients had contracted the infection while traveling when we compared our Salmonella Kentucky sequences to the international isolates, which confirmed with what we had learned from the Washington State Department of Health epidemiology data,” said Soltys.
According to Shah, Salmonella Kentucky is one of the most prevalent strains of the virus in domestic chicken, while fewer than 100 instances of illness are reported by the disease annually in the US. If fluoroquinolone-resistant Salmonella Kentucky were to become endemic in the US, however, case numbers would probably rise as more people experienced symptoms bad enough to require medical attention.Shah stated, “One, you probably won’t get better on antibiotics.” “Secondly, you’re going to upset the regular microorganisms in your body, and it can make your infection worse.”