International journal of food microbiology
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Int. J. Food Microbiol. · Jun 2012
Occurrence and characteristics of methicillin-resistant and -susceptible Staphylococcus aureus and methicillin-resistant coagulase-negative staphylococci from Japanese retail ready-to-eat raw fish.
Staphylococci are not part of the normal fish microflora. The presence of staphylococci on fish is an indication of (a) post-harvest contamination due to poor personnel hygiene, or (b) disease in fish. The aim of this study was to determine the prevalence, molecular genetic characteristics, antibiotic resistance and virulence factors of methicillin-susceptible Staphylococcus aureus (MSSA), methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA) and methicillin-resistant coagulase-negative staphylococci (MR-CoNS) isolated from 200 samples of retail ready-to-eat raw fish (sashimi) collected from the Japanese prefecture of Hiroshima. ⋯ None of the S. aureus isolates carried the Panton-Valentine leucocidin (PVL) encoding genes, lukF-PV and lukS-PV. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report to show MRSA and MR-CoNS isolated from retail ready-to-eat food in Japan. Our results showed that sashimi is a likely vehicle for transmission of multidrug-resistant and toxigenic staphylococci.