Prevalence and Antibiotic Resistance Phenotypes of Pseudomonas spp. in Fresh Fish Fillets.

In fresh fish products, excessive loads of can lead to their rapid spoilage. It is wise for Food Business Operators (FBOs) to consider its presence both in whole and prepared fish products. With the current study, we aimed to quantify spp. in fresh fillets of , and . For all three fish species, we detected loads of presumptive no lower than 10-10 cfu/g in more than 50% of the samples. We isolated 55 strains of presumptive and carried out their biochemical identification; 67.27% of the isolates were actually . These data confirm that fresh fish fillets are normally contaminated with spp. and the FBOs should add it as a "process hygiene criterion" according to EC Regulation n.2073/2005. Furthermore, in food hygiene, it is worth evaluating the prevalence of antimicrobial resistance. A total of 37 strains were tested against 15 antimicrobials, and they all were identified as being resistant to at least one antimicrobial, mainly penicillin G, ampicillin, amoxicillin, tetracycline, erythromycin, vancomycin, clindamycin and trimethoprim. As many as 76.47% of isolates were multi-drug resistant. Our results confirm that is becoming increasingly resistant to antimicrobials and thus should be continuously monitored in foods.