Carriage of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus in children in Brazil

Abstract

The extent of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) carriage in Brazilian infants is largely unknown. We evaluated the presence of MRSA nasopharyngeal (NP) carriage in 686 children younger than 5 years with respiratory tract infection (609) and meningitis (77). S. aureus was isolated in 93 (13.5%) NP specimens of which 7 (1.02%) were identified as MRSA (oxacillin MIC, >256 mu g/mL) harboring SCCmec type III. the dendrogram derived from the pulsed-field gel electrophoresis gel images showed that the MRSA strains diverged from the Brazilian endemic hospital-acquired clones from 10.4% to 21.7%. Although the MRSA strains were recovered from children within the first 6 h of their admission to hospital, the presence of SCCmec type III along with the multidrug-resistant profile of the isolates raises the hypotheses that these MRSA strains may have hospital origin and are now spreading into the pediatric community as colonizing pathogens. (c) 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.