Animal mycoplasmas are major bacterial pathogens causing various diseases in livestock and pets and also significant economic losses in herds. Their diagnostics and antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST) are difficult because of their growth characteristics.
Ongoing project
Standard usual procedures for other bacteria don’t apply for mycoplasmas. As a consequence, their clinical impact and their contribution to antimicrobial use and resistance is often disregarded. Because of their intrinsic resistance to the broadly used ampicilins/penicilins family and the increasing number of acquired resistances to other antimicrobial families, mycoplasmas must be subjected to an improved antimicrobial resistance surveillance.
The MyMIC network is developed as a necessary first step towards this aim. It will allow sharing best practices and harmonised procedures between expert laboratories as well as proposing future new required developments. Furthermore, aggregation of AST data from different laboratories will permit first proposal of tentative epidemiological cut-offs as a surrogate to clinical breakpoints in order to help clinical interpretation of AST results.
Review on new alternative AST techniques, antimicrobial use across the different animal sectors and pharmacologic data will come as a complement to the diagnostic and AST guidelines expected from the MyMIC network. Lastly MycMIC is expected to be the basis for construction of future laboratories projects for animal mycoplasmas diagnostics and AST methods comparison and validation.
Expected outcomes:
- Analysis of the answers to the questionnaire (on culture, identification and antimicrobial susceptibility testing) distributed to all partners.
- Construction of a database to gather all MIC data obtained with the same (or a comparable) method for different Mycoplasma species (livestock and companion animals).
- Contribution to MIC distribution open databases such as on the EUCAST site and participation to VetCAST (EUCAST subcommittee dealing with all aspects of AST of bacterial pathogens of animal origin).
- Writing of guidelines in order to harmonize culture, identification and AST in livestock mycoplasmas.
- Creation of a website for the network.
- Drafting a project for a future JPI AMR call (or other calls on antimicrobial resistance) funding laboratory activities like ring trials, exchange of reference materials and methods comparison or validation, development of new rapid method for detection of resistance determinants (including WGAS).
Sharing and exchanging knowledge and expertise with developing countries in control of mycoplasmas in this part of the world.
Network partners
- Tardy Florence, French Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health and Safety, France (Coordinator)
This network includes 48 partners from 18 countries: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Cuba, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Nigeria, Pakistan, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.
