Correlation of annual prevalence between cephems resistance and blaCMY-2 in Salmonella enterica isolated from retail meat sources in the United States

Abstract The objective of this study was to correlate the annual prevalence of cephems resistance and bla CMY-2 in Salmonella enterica using surveillance data in the United States. Using datasets retrieved from the surveillance programs of the United States National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System (NARMS) for Enteric Bacteria from 2002 to 2018, we performed Spearman’s correlation analysis to correlate the annual prevalence data. We observed a near-perfect positive correlation in the annual prevalence between cefoxitin ( ρ = 0.97, P < 0.0001), ceftiofur ( ρ = 0.96, P < 0.0001), ceftriaxone ( ρ = 0.95, P < 0.0001) resistance and bla CMY-2 in S. enterica recovered from chicken retail meat. Similarly, we observed a very high positive correlation in the annual prevalence between cefoxitin ( ρ = 0.94, P < 0.0001), ceftiofur ( ρ = 0.91, P < 0.0001), ceftriaxone ( ρ = 0.82, P < 0.0001) resistance and bla CMY-2 in S. enterica recovered from turkey retail meat. Using Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) modeling, the forecasted annual prevalence of beta-lactam resistance for the years 2019–2021 was similar to the NARMS-reported data for these periods. Correlation between the annual prevalence of cephems resistance and bla CMY-2 suggests either data can be used as a proxy for decision-making in retail meat surveillance programs.