RESEARCH ARTICLE Open Access
Occurrence of antibiotic resistance in bacteria isolated from seawater organisms caught in
Campania Region: preliminary study Giorgio Smaldone1†, Raffaele Marrone1*, Silvia Cappiello2†, Giuseppe A Martin1†, Gaetano Oliva1†,
Maria L Cortesi1† and Aniello Anastasio1†
Abstract
Background: Environmental contamination by pharmaceuticals is a public health concern: drugs administered to
humans and animals are excreted with urine or faeces and attend the sewage treatment. The main consequences of use and abuse of antibiotics is the development and diffusion of antibiotic resistance that has become a serious global problem. Aim of the study is to evaluate the presence of antimicrobial residues and to assess the antimicrobial resistance in bacteria species isolated from different wild caught seawater fish and fishery products.
Results: Three antibiotic substances (Oxytetracicline, Sulfamethoxazole and Trimethoprim) were detected (by screening and confirmatory methods) in Octopus vulgaris, Sepia officinalis and Thais haemastoma. All Vibrio strains isolated from fish were resistant to Vancomycin (VA) and Penicillin (P). In Vibrio alginolyticus, isolated in Octopus vulgaris, a resistance against 9 antibiotics was noted. Conclusions: Wild caught seawater fish collected in Gulf of Salerno (Campania Region), especially in marine areas including mouths of streams, were contaminated with antibiotic-resistant bacteria strains and that they might play an important role in the spread of antibiotic-resistance.
Keywords: Antibiotic resistance, Vibrio strains, Fish, Antibiotic residues
Background
Environmental contamination by pharmaceuticals is a public health concern. Medical substances may roughly be divided into medical substances used by human or veterinary medicine. The veterinary drugs may further be subdivided into substances used as growth promoters for livestock production, therapeutics in livestock productions, coccidiostatic used for poultry production, therapeutics for treatment of livestock on fields or as feed additives in fish farms.
Drugs administered to humans and animals are excreted with urine or faeces [1] and attend the sewage treatment plant [2]; successively if substances are hydrophilic or are metabolized to a more hydrophilic form of the parent lipophilic substance, will pass the waste water treatment plant and end up in the receiving waters where they may be are present at very low concentrations; it is important noted that several substances could stimulate a response in humans and animals also at low doses with a very specific target [3]. A recent study showed that a mixture of drugs at the concentrations actually found in the aquatic environment of some Italian areas is able to exert toxic effects on the proliferation of human and zebra fish (Danio rerio) cells cultures [4].
The main consequences of use and abuse of antibiotics is the development and diffusion of antibiotic resistance that represent a public health problem, with obvious consequences in human and veterinary medicine, since it affects animal therapy and food safety [5,6]. World wide there is growing concern about the increased prevalence of antibiotic resistance: the growing alarm related
to the spreading of the resistance of antibiotics considered of first choice in the treatment of specific human infections prompted measures for antimicrobial
* Correspondence: raffaele.marrone@unina.it †Equal contributors
1Departement of Veterinary Medicine and Animal Production, University of Naples “Federico II”, via F. Delpino 1, 80137 Naples, NA, Italy Full list of author information is available at the end of the article © 2014 Smaldone et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. Smaldone et al. BMC Veterinary Research 2014, 10:161 http://www.biomedcentral.com/1746-6148/10/161
