Group A Streptococcus (GAS), commonly known as Streptococcus pyogenes, is one of the top ten infectious causes of death globally. Increased antibiotic resistance is the main cause of streptococcal infection treatment failure. Therefore, this study was conducted to evaluate the occurrence, antimicrobial resistance, and genetic characterization of S. pyogenes isolated from different patients. A total of 60 pharyngitis and tonsillitis throat swabs were obtained. Only 7 isolates (11.6%) were confirmed to be S. pyogenes. The highest prevalence of S. pyogenes was obtained from children, boys (26.6%) followed by adults (males) (16.6%) while the lowest prevalence was recovered from girls (11.7%). On the other hand, no infection was recorded in the case of females. All S. pyogenes isolates were susceptible to ampicillin-sulbactam, ciprofloxacin, chloramphenicol, doxycycline, meropenem, and tetracycline. While 100% showed resistance to amoxicillin-clavulanic acid, cefotaxime, and cephradine followed by ceftriaxone (71%) and cefuroxime (71%). Based on the multidrug-resistance (MDR) profile, a total of 6 out of 7(85.7%) S. pyogenes isolates were resistant to 3 or more of β-lactam antibiotics. The PCR assay revealed that the blaTEM, blaZ, blaIMP, and blaCTX genes were detected in 57.1%, 28.5%, 57.1%, 42.8%, 15%, 11.3% and 5.6% of the isolates. To the best of our knowledge, this is the global study about these beta lactamase genes in Streptococcus pyogenes.
Key words: Streptococcus pyogenes, β-lactam resistance, pharyngitis
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