Arcobacter spp. at retail food from Portugal: Prevalence, genotyping and antibiotics resistance

Arcobacter genus is considered a foodborne emergent pathogen able to cause disease among humans and animals. The wide distribution and high prevalence of Arcobacter in food is becoming a concern, since consumption of contaminated food and water is considered the most probable route of Arcobacter transmission to humans. In this work, ready-to-eat packaged vegetables, poultry, pork, beef and fish meat were purchased from several retail markets and supermarkets and tested for the presence of Arcobacter spp. Suspected colonies were isolated and identified, characterized through ERIC-PCR and resistance to nine antibiotics commonly used to treat infections by this microorganism was assessed; in parallel, Arcobacter spp. was directly detected on enrichment broth by multiplex PCR. The results show a high prevalence of Arcobacter spp. among retail food, with an overall prevalence of 60.5% obtained by both molecular and culture detection. A. butzleri was the most frequently isolated species (58.5%) followed by A. cryaerophilus (35.8%) and A. skirrowii (5.7%). A high genetic diversity among the isolates was observed, despite the detection of a possible cross-contamination between food samples. Also, a high rate of multidrug resistance among the isolates (85.7%) was observed. Taken together, our results suggest that the consumption of Arcobacter-contaminated food products is of public health concern.Susana Ferreira was supported by a fellowship (SFRH/BPD/101959/2014) from Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia and co-financed by Fundo Social Europeu. This work was supported by FEDER funds through the POCI - COMPETE 2020 - Operational Programme Competitiveness and Internationalisation in Axis I - Strengthening research, technological development and innovation (Project POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007491) and National Funds by FCT - Foundation for Science and Technology (Project UID/Multi/00709/2013).