Estudio de las resistencias a los antimicrobianos de bacterias zoonóticas y comensales aisladas en alimentos de la provincia de Valencia

Foodborne diseases are a growing public health problem throughout the world. Within this broad spectrum of diseases that can be caused by the ingestion of contaminated food, food poisoning are those diseases that, in addition to being transmitted by food, are caused by biological agents or their toxins, and represent one of the most serious dangers. important associated with food consumption. The social and economic costs of these diseases are difficult to assess, since they imply not only medical costs for treatment and hospitalization and lost work days, but also, in many cases, irreversible damage to people and even death. On the other hand, microorganisms resistant to antimicrobials constitute a significant risk to public health. In this context, during the last decades, a new concern regarding the food chain has arisen, since it can play an important role in the transmission of resistant bacteria, as well as resistance genes from the animal kingdom to humans. Several recent studies highlight the role of food processing environments as potential antimicrobial resistance hotspots, contributing to this spread phenomenon. The realization of this thesis has been based on the Decision of the European Union on the monitoring and notification of the resistance of zoonotic and commensal bacteria to antibiotics, of November 12, 2013, whose purpose and scope of application is monitoring and the notification, from samples of certain animal populations used for food production and from certain foods, of the following bacteria Salmonella spp., Escherichia coli as a commensal indicator, Campylobacter spp. and, finally, Gram positive bacteria: Enterococcus faecalis and Enterococcus faecium, also as a commensal indicator, isolated in different types of food and water in the province of Valencia between 2014 and 2017. Subsequently, the sensitivity or resistance of the isolated microorganisms was studied to different antibiotics according to the recommendations of the European regulations, determining the frequency and distribution of antimicrobial resistance or multiresistance, as well as the most frequent patterns and, subsequently, establishing the relationship between the type of microbial contamination, resistance and multiresistance to antimicrobials with the type of food. The determination of resistance to antimicrobials was carried out using epidemiological cut-off points, instead of the clinical ones, since in this study the capacity or not to produce disease in the host was not evaluated, but only the subpopulation that lacks acquired resistance mechanisms (wild-type phenotype) than those that do have such mechanisms. The results obtained clearly show that not only in the foods analyzed in the province of Valencia, to a greater or lesser extent, microbial contamination has been detected, but that many of these microorganisms present resistance and multiresistance to the different antimicrobials tested. Results consistent with the data from the European Union in general and from Spain, in particular, and which show the need to promote and reinforce the prudent use of antibiotics under the supervision of experts. Furthermore, instead of acting as an antimicrobial resistance amplifying system, we propose that the food chain could act as a resistance modulator to reduce the prevalence of resistant microorganisms through careful control of the same.