Drug susceptibility patterns of rapidly growing mycobacteria isolated from skin and soft tissue infections in Venezuela.

To our knowledge, this is the first work on drug susceptibility patterns of rapid growing mycobacteria from Latin America. The susceptibility patterns for 14 antimicrobial agents of the three most important species that cause skin infections in Venezuela were determined as follows: 63 strains belonging to Mycobacterium abscessus group, 66 strains of the Mycobacterium fortuitum group, and 13 Mycobacterium chelonae strains. The M. abscessus group strains were resistant to most antibiotics tested while M. fortuitum strains were relatively susceptible to a large number of antibiotics. We demonstrate the presence of an inducible and truncated erm(41) gene in M. abscessus group, namely M. abscessus subsp. massiliense. We show the variations in susceptibility to antimicrobial agents within and between the mycobacterial species and compare our susceptibility patterns with those reported from other countries. We conclude that the identification of mycobacteria to the species level can guide the antibiotic treatment, but that it is always important to consider drug susceptibility testing when rapidly mycobacteria are isolated.