Prevalence, antibiotic susceptibility and characterization of Vibrio parahaemolyticus isolates in China

Vibrio parahaemolyticus is a marine and estuarine bacterium that poses a major threat to human health worldwide. In this study, from 2017 to 2019, we evaluated 900 food samples collected from China in 2017, with the aim of determining the incidence and features of V. parahaemolyticus in ready-to-eat (RTE) foods, shrimp and fish in China. The contamination rates in these were 3.67, 19.33 and 10.67%, respectively, and the prevalence of V. parahaemolyticus was higher in summer than in winter. In addition, 101 V. parahaemolyticus strains were isolated. Our results suggested that most of the isolates were resistant to aminoglycosides based on the antimicrobial resistance patterns of these aquatic product isolates against 14 antimicrobial agents. Furthermore, most of the isolates were multidrug-resistant. Serotyping showed that the isolates of the O2 serotype comprised the maximum proportion. Enterobacterial repetitive intergenic consensus sequence (ERIC)-PCR results indicated that the isolates (n = 101) could be classified into 12 clusters. There were 82 STs suggesting genetic variation and relatedness among these isolates. Our findings demonstrated the presence of V. parahaemolyticus in foods from Chinese retail markets and show that this methodology can be used for microbiological risk assessment in China.