Intensive care unit sinks are persistently colonized with multidrug resistant bacteria and mobilizable, resistance-conferring plasmids.

ABSTRACT: Contamination of hospital sinks with microbial pathogens presents a serious potential threat to patients, but our understanding of sink colonization dynamics is largely based on infection outbreaks. Here, we investigate the colonization patterns of multidrug-resistant organisms (MDROs) in intensive care unit sinks and water from two hospitals in the USA and Pakistan collected over 27 months of prospective sampling. Using culture-based methods, we recovered 822 bacterial isolates representing 104 unique species and genomospecies. Genomic analyses revealed long-term colonization by Pseudomonas spp. and Serratia marcescens strains across multiple rooms. Nanopore sequencing uncovered examples of long-term persistence of resistance-conferring plasmids in unrelated hosts. These dat

SUBMITTER: Diorio-Toth L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10469867 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature