Prevalence, antimicrobial susceptibility and molecular characterization of Campylobacter isolates recovered from humans and poultry in Lebanon.

Recovery of Campylobacter was attempted from 281 consecutive non selected out-patients diarrheic stools, 150 individual ceca collected from meat chicken breeder farms and 31 slaughtered marketed chicken obtained from shops in Lebanon. Campylobacter isolates were recovered from 2 (0.7%) human stool specimens, 34 (22.7%) chicken ceca and 3 (9.7%) raw chicken carcasses. Speciation of these isolates revealed 2 C. jejuni from humans diarrheic stools, 16 C. coli, 10 C. jejuni, 3 C. fetus, 2 C. fennelliae (Helicobacter fennelliae, new taxon), 2 C. upsaliensis, 1 C. cryaerophila (Archobacter cryaerophilus, new taxon) from chicken ceca and 2 C. coli and 1 C. fennelliae (H. fennelliae) from raw chicken carcasses. Antimicrobial susceptibility testing of the different isolates against 9 antimicrobial agents was performed using the E-test. Overall, most isolates showed high to moderate susceptibility to gentamicin (97%), amoxicillin/clavulanate (95%), clindamycin (77%), chloramphenicol (77%), and ampicillin (69%). Lower susceptibility were observed against tetracycline (49%), erythromycin (47%), ciprofloxacin (39%), and norfloxacin (36%). This overall susceptibility profile generally applied to C. coli and C. jejuni, as well, although C. coli mostly showed higher susceptibility than C. jejuni. beta-lactamase production was detected in 59% of all the isolates, being higher in C. coli (72%) than C. jejuni (33%). Whole cell protein profile analysis of 18 C. coli and 12 C. jejuni by SDS-PAGE revealed 6 different patterns. In both species, major variations existed in the region between mol wt 45-60 and all protein profiles were dominated by the presence of 5 major bands of mol wt: 61 (doublet), 45, 31 and an approximate 24. Differences in banding patterns within and between both species indicated diversity and heterogeneity of strains. This study shows that despite high prevalence and diversity of strains in chicken, Campylobacter in Lebanon is rare in human diarrheic stools compared to Salmonella (3.2%) and Shigella (1.4%).