Prevalence and antibiotic resistance of salmonella in poultry meat from retail markets

Abstract:

One of the most persistent challenges in Nigerian food-safety policy is the silent transmission of antibiotic-resistant pathogens through the poultry meat supply chain, where farm-level antibiotic use and fragmented retail distribution converge to build a bacterial reservoir that standard surveillance programmes struggle to track. This research assessed the prevalence of Salmonella in 280 raw poultry meat samples collected from retail outlets in Ibadan district, Oyo State, and Kano metropolis, Kano State, between April 2023 and February 2024. Salmonella isolates were recovered from 67 samples (23.9% prevalence), serotyped by a standard antisera panel, and screened against a 12-antibiotic panel using the Kirby-Bauer disc diffusion method supplemented with minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) determination. S. Typhimurium was the dominant serovar (38%), followed by S. enteritidis (27%) and S. infantis (14%). Forty-eight percent of isolates showed multidrug resistance (resistance to three or more antibiotic classes), with high resistance to ampicillin (78%), trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole (68%), and ciprofloxacin (42%). Prevalence differed sharply by retail channel: unorganised vendor samples returned 32.4% Salmonella positivity against 15.7% for supermarket-chain samples. The findings identify multidrug-resistant S. Typhimurium in unorganised retail as a priority public-health concern requiring coordinated surveillance and intervention.