A review of Group B Streptococcus maternal-fetal infection

Abstract

For a long time, infectious diseases have been a major public health problem, mainly maternal fetal infections linked to neonate’s mortality. Streptococcus agalactiae (GBS) infection is one of the main infections, which threat mother-infant health. One of the major challenges that remains to be addressed is therapeutic care strategy, further, the emergence of antibiotic resistant bacteria which constitute a major challenge for clinicians. Concerning GBS an antibiotic prophylaxis regimen is adopted to reduce the vertical transmission of bacteria from mother to neonate and avoid the appearance of complications related to GBS infection such as early onset disease and late onset disease that can lead to stillbirths. Like most bacteria, GBS is susceptible to first-line antibiotics, and in case of resistance, therapy is based on second and third-line antibiotics. The drug susceptibility testing of microorganisms is therefore essential in the therapeutic strategy, because it not only facilitates the orientation of treatment but also help to set up a system supervising the expansion of resistant strains. This present paper constitutes a literature review on Streptococcus agalactiae maternal-fetal infection and summarizes some epidemiological studies on the emergence of this bacterium as well as it provides the prevalence of its resistance to antibiotics and outlines some vaccine development strategies

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