Molecular characterization of Mycobacterium bovis isolates from patients with tuberculosis in Baja California, Mexico

•The prevalence of disease by Mycobacterium bovis is frequently underestimated.•There is human to human transmission of M. bovis.•MIRU-26 locus showed the highest discriminatory power (h = 0.53).•Most of the isolates (70%) are distributed in four main allelic profiles.•Only the 30% of isolates showed unique allelic profiles.

The incidence of tuberculosis (TB) from Mycobacterium bovis in humans is likely to be underestimated and in some cases even ignored in most developing countries. This may be due to the difficulty of differentiating TB caused by either Mycobacterium tuberculosis or M. bovis.Our objectives were to determine the prevalence of M. bovis human disease among the patients referred for study to the Tuberculosis Laboratory of the Tijuana General Hospital in Baja California, Mexico and to characterize molecularly the clinical isolates using 8 loci of MIRU-VNTR.A cross-sectional analysis of all culture-proven cases of tuberculosis was conducted during the period from January 1, 2011 through June 30, 2013. Clinical isolates that exhibited resistance to pyrazinamide (Z) were submitted for molecular analysis.A total of 2699 clinical samples were cultured during the study period and 600 (22%) that tested positive were processed for drug susceptibility for first line drugs. Sixty-four (10.7%) of the tested isolates tested were resistant to Z, and 27 (4.5%) of those were subsequently identified molecularly as M. bovis. Three of the M. bovis isolates were polyresistant to Z, isoniazid (H), ethambutol (E) and rifampicin (R) (Z + H + E, Z + E and Z + R); the rest were only resistant only to Z. VNTR typing, based on the 8 VNTR loci commonly tested for M. bovis, detected 12 allelic profiles (genotypes).The real burden of M. bovis cases among the total reported human tuberculosis cases can only be known from especially designed studies in which, during a specific period, all specimens submitted to tuberculosis diagnosis in one or more laboratories are cultured on the appropriate media and the isolated mycobacteria are analyzed to differentiate M. bovis from M. tuberculosis and other Mycobacterium species.