Non-typhoid Salmonella are important cause of enteric diseases and associated with severe morbidity and excess mortality worldwide.
TheSalmonella National Reference Center (SNRC) identifies outbreaks, assesses trends and changes in Salmonella serovar distribution and together with epidemiological data supports public health policy in Israel.
Salmonella spp. isolates are sent to the SNRC from hospital and HMO microbiology laboratories for conformation and subtyping. Serovars are assigned according to the Kauffmann-White scheme. Representative clinical isolates are tested for susceptibility to six antibiotics using the disk-diffusion method, according to the CLSI recommendations: ampicillin (AMP), trimethoprim/sulfamethoxazatole (SXT), chloramphenicol (C), ciprofloxacin (CIP), ceftriaxone (CRO) and tetracycline (TET).
During 2004-2013, about 150 serovars (out of >2500 known) were responsible for human salmonellosis. The 10 top serovars, responsible for 70-77% of clinical isolates change yearly.
In 2011, S.Muenchen emerged from being only 0.7% of total Salmonella isolates in 2010 (19 out of 2723) to 5.8% (104 out of 1801) in 2013. A similar trend was observed in isolates from chicken.
Antibiotic resistance testing of S.Muenchen showed 78.1% sensitivity to all the tested antibiotics (150 isolates out of the 192 tested). The three main resistance patterns were resistance to TET (10 isolates, 5.2%), resistance to AMP (9 isolates, 4.7%) and resistance to AMP,SXT,TET (7 isolates, 3.6%).
S. Muenchen emerged to be the 4th most prevalent Salmonella serovar after Infantis (37.1%), Enteritidis (11.2%) and Typhimurium (6.3%). It has replaced S. Kentucky (which frequency has decreased since 2010 from 5.4% to 3.2%) at the top of the O:8 group.
