Outbreak of sexually transmitted S. sonnei bla CTX-M-15 in England: an epidemiological and genomic investigation
Listed in
This article is not in any list yet, why not save it to one of your lists.Abstract
The diarrhoeal disease, shigellosis, can be sustained as a sexually transmissible enteric illness among gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men (GBMSM). Multiple extensively drug-resistant strains of Shigella have been detected through genomic surveillance, which have typically been associated with plasmids carrying the gene variant bla CTX-M-27 . We report an increase in likely sexually transmissible cases of Shigella carrying bla CTX-M-15, which was previously associated with travel. In 2023, there were 117 cases belonging to the single 10-SNP single linkage cluster, t10.1814. While this cluster had been present in England since August 2019, genetic analyses revealed that bla CTX-M-15 entered the lineage on a novel resistance plasmid coincident with the first case of the outbreak. This highlights the shifting antimicrobial resistance landscape of sexually transmissible Shigella and the parallel emergence of resistance determinants against third generation cephalosporins in sexual transmission networks suggests high levels of antimicrobial selection pressure among GBMSM.
