Assessing antibiotic resistance in fecal Escherichia coli in young calves using cluster analysis techniques

This study uses cluster analysis techniques to describe the antibiotic susceptibility patterns seen in calf fecal Escherichia coli (E. coli). Cohorts of 30 dairy calves at six farms were sampled at 2-week intervals during the pre-weaning period. At each sampling occasion five fecal E. coli isolates per calf were analyzed for antibiotic susceptibility to 12 antibiotics using the disk diffusion method. All isolates had a profile consisting of the aggregate measured inhibition zone size for each of the evaluated antibiotics. Several cluster analytic algorithms were assessed to partition the E. coli isolates. For our data, Ward's minimum variance method met the objectives of the study. Relative to the number of possible combinations of resistance clusters, a parsimonious set of 14 patterns was developed. This set of E. coli isolates exhibited a limited set of resistance patterns to the different antibiotics indicating that certain resistance genes may be linked.