antibiotics Review Staphylococcus aureus Infections in Malaysia: A Review of Antimicrobial Resistance and Characteristics of the Clinical Isolates, 1990–2017 Ainal Mardziah Che Hamzah 1 , Chew Chieng Yeo 2 , Suat Moi Puah 3 , Kek Heng Chua 3 and Ching Hoong Chew 1,* 1 Faculty of Health Sciences, Universiti Sultan Zainal Abidin, Kuala Nerus 21300, Terengganu, Malaysia 2 Faculty of Medicine, Universiti Sultan Zainal Abidin, Kuala Terengganu 20400, Terengganu, Malaysia 3 Department of Biomedical Science, Faculty of Medicine, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur 50603, Malaysia * Correspondence:
[email protected] or
[email protected] Received: 29 June 2019; Accepted: 22 August 2019; Published: 26 August 2019 Abstract: Staphylococcus aureus is an important nosocomial pathogen and its multidrug resistant strains, particularly methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA), poses a serious threat to public health due to its limited therapeutic options. The increasing MRSA resistance towards vancomycin, which is the current drug of last resort, gives a great challenge to the treatment and management of MRSA infections. While vancomycin resistance among Malaysian MRSA isolates has yet to be documented, a case of vancomycin resistant S. aureus has been reported in our neighboring country, Indonesia. In this review, we present the antimicrobial resistance profiles of S. aureus clinical isolates in Malaysia with data obtained from the Malaysian National Surveillance on Antimicrobial Resistance (NSAR) reports as well as various peer-reviewed published records spanning a period of nearly three decades (1990–2017). We also review the clonal types and characteristics of Malaysian S. aureus isolates, where hospital-associated (HA) MRSA isolates tend to carry staphylococcal cassette chromosome mec (SCCmec) type III and were of sequence type (ST)239, whereas community-associated (CA) isolates are mostly SCCmec type IV/V and ST30.