Emergence of methicillin-resistant, vancomycin-intermediate Staphylococcus aureus among patients associated with group A Streptococcal pharyngitis infection in southern India

Abstract Beyond Staphylococcus aureus being an etiological agent for several serious clinical complications, the foot prints of S. aureus in pharyngitis infection has also been recently recognized. With due response to the fact, a prospective study was conducted between 2009 and 2010 to describe the molecular epidemiology of S. aureus in throat swabs of pharyngitis patients. A total of 63 methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA) and 102 methicillin-susceptible S. aureus (MSSA) isolates were recovered from 265 throat swabs, representing a community-acquired outpatient population from Tamil Nadu, India. Molecular characterization of MRSA was done by two conventional multiplex PCR assays including Panton-Valentine leukocidin (PVL), mecA and nuc genes, and staphylococcal cassette chromosome mec (SCC mec ) typing. Among 165 S. aureus isolates, methicillin resistance was observed in 38.2% ( n  = 63), in which 69.8% ( n  = 44/63) of the MRSA along with 55.9% ( n  = 57/102) of MSSA harbored PVL toxin genes. SCC mec typing showed 50.8% of isolates as SCC mec V ( n  = 32), 44.4% as SCC mec III ( n  = 28), and 1.6% as SCC mec types I, II and IVa ( n  = 1). Multilocus sequence typing performed for 26 selected MRSA isolates resulted in 12 different sequence types (ST), including a novel ST2129/SCC mec III, PVL-positive. Ten MRSA isolates were categorized as ST772 (38.5%)/SCC mec V, PVL-positive, and three isolates as ST368 (11.5%)/SCC mec III, PVL-negative. Though the prominent clones of ST772/SCC mec V were multidrug-susceptible worldwide, they were highly multidrug-resistant in the current study, including four clones intermediate to vancomycin. Totally, 10 (15.9%) out of 63 MRSA isolates were documented as vancomycin-intermediate S. aureus (VISA). Collectively, the present study for the first time portrayed the high prevalence of active MRSA pharyngitis infection and also emphasizes an alarming need for discrimination of pharyngeal-asymptomatic carriers of S. aureus from those with an active S. aureus pharyngitis infection.