CAT III chloramphenicol resistance in Pasteurella haemolytica and Pasteurella multocida isolated from calves

Chloramphenicol, which had been used extensively for antimicrobial veterinary therapy, was prohibited in Europe in 1994. Soon after it became available, resistance to this drug was detected, generally conferred by plasmids encoding inactivating enzymes, the chloramphenicol acetyltransferases (CAT), in Gram-negative as well as in Gram-positive bacteria. In the last few years, resistance to antibiotics emerged in Pasteurella strains from breeding herds and this evolution was followed by a national surveillance network. Chloramphenicol-resistance was more recently detected in multiresistant strains. We studied 25 strains of Pasteurella, selected for their resistance to chloramphenicol. Production of a CAT was demonstrated in all these strains. PCR amplification indicated that the CAT produced was of type III for 23 of them. In these strains, chloramphenicol-resistance was mediated by plasmids of about 5.1 kb. Southern blots on restriction fragments suggested a high degree of homology between these 5.1 kb plasmids. In the two other strains, production of a CAT type I was demonstrated, and the corresponding genes were either shown on a plasmid of 17 or 5.5 kb.