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Abstract :
[en] Clostridium difficile is an important cause of infectious diarrhea in hospitals. The major risk factors for the development of nosocomial C. difficile associated disease include antibiotic therapy and increasing age. In animals, as pigs, calves and horses, C. difficile also seems to be an important cause of enteric disease.
The main objective of this study was to characterize and compare animal and human C. difficile strains with respect to the PCR-ribotype and the antibiotic resistance. Multilocus sequence typing (MLST) and multiple-Locus Variable number tandem repeat analysis (MLVA) were performed in order to study clonal relationships of the isolates.
Human C. difficile isolates were obtained from care home residents and hospitalized patients. Animal isolates were collected from stool samples and carcasses of pigs and cattle at slaughter. An identification of the strains was performed by PCR-ribotyping. Further characterization was performed by antibiotic resistance, MLST and MLVA analysis. A neighbourd-joining phylogenetic three was constructed in order to determine the correlation between human and food isolates.
A great variety of PCR ribotypes was found among the animal isolates, including PCR ribotypes 078 and 014. The most prevalent PCR-ribotypes in the nursing home were PCR-ribotypes 027 and 020. A high resistance to moxifloxacin, erythromycin, gentamicin and clindamycin was detected for some of the strains. Phylogenetic analysis showed that human and animal isolates with the same PCR-ribotype cluster in the same lineage, suggesting a potential risk of interspecies transmission.
