Foodborne diseases: epidemiological study of prevalent pathogens in the Norwest of Argentina region (NOA).

MONICA FLORENCIA TORREZ LAMBERTI; BARRIONUEVO MEDINA E.; BIANCHI A. M.; VALDEZ, P. M.; MARÍA DE LAS MERCEDES PESCARETTI; MÓNICA A. DELGADO

Buenos Aires

Congreso; Reunión Conjunta de Sociedades de Biociencias 2017. LIII Reunión Anual Sociedad Argentina de Investigación en Bioquímica y Biología Molecular (SAIB).; 2017

Foodborne Diseases (FBD) affect more than 77 million American people every year, these diseases are caused by food ingestion or water polluted. The etiological agents could have different origins but the most important is bacterial. In fact, 95% of the annual deceases are due to enteropathogens like Salmonella and Shigella. On these bases, we decide to perform an epidemiological study of the pathogens responsible for infantile diarrhea, and its prevalence in the NOA population. For this propose, we isolated and characterized clinical strains from stool samples collected over 2013-2017 period in different NOA Header Hospitals. Of 17,100 cases analyzed, we isolated 1774 samples for further study. Unlike other countries, we observed that from this total (1774), the most abundant genus was identified as Shigella (88.75%), and Salmonella in second place. It is important to note that the highest percentage of isolated Salmonella sp strains was obtained in the Catamarca Hospital, specifically during the 2015 year. However, the greatest number of pathogen isolation was carried out in the Tucumán province with a wide difference range. In concordance with the global tendency, we found that some isolated strains presented a multidrug-resistance phenotype. In addition, we observed that these isolates displayed a wide range of plasmidic profiles, bacteriocin production and motility behavior. A deep analysis allowed us to generate a clinical isolates collection composed of more than 500 samples. Taken together, all data analyzed here suggest that at least in the NOA region, Shigella is the prevalent pathogen, being Shigella flexneri the most frequently isolated, mainly in the 3-5 years population old.