Healthy dogs and cats could be passing on multidrug-resistant organisms (MDROs; bacteria that resist treatment with more than one antibiotic) to their hospitalized owners, and vice versa. according to new research being presented at this year’s European Congress of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases (ECCMID) in Copenhagen, Denmark to be held next month. However, the researchers have also clarified that “we identified only a handful of cases suggesting that neither cat nor dog ownership is an important risk factor for multidrug-resistant organism colonization in hospital patients.”
The study of over 2,800 hospital patients and their companion animals is by Dr. Carolin Hackmann from Charité University Hospital Berlin, Germany, and colleagues.
“Our findings verify that the sharing of multidrug-resistant organisms between companion animals and their owners is possible,” said Dr. Hackmann.
The role of pets as potential reservoirs of MDROs is a growing concern worldwide. Antimicrobial resistance happens when infection-causing microbes (such as bacteria, viruses or fungi) evolve to become resistant to the drug designed to kill them. Estimates suggest that antimicrobial resistant infections caused almost 1.3 million deaths and were associated with nearly 5 million deaths around the world in 2019.
In this case control study, researchers wanted to find out whether pets (ie, cats and dogs) play a role in the infection of hospital patients with MDROs.
They focused on the most common superbugs in hospital patients—methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), vancomycin-resistant enterococci (VRE), 3rd generation cephalosporin-resistant Enterobacterales (3GCRE) and carbapenem-resistant Enterobacterales (CRE), which are resistant to multiple antibiotics including penicillin and cephalosporins.