A.M.M. attended a 3-month training course through the CRESIB-UPCH collaborative agreement; training was partially funded by Consejo Nacional de Ciencia, Tecnologia e Innovacion Tecnologica (CONCYTEC, FONDECYT) in Peru. This work was partially funded by the Agencia Espanola de Cooperacion Internacional para el Desarrollo (AECID), Spain, Programa de Cooperacion Interuniversitaria e Investigacion Cientifica con Iberoamerica (D/019499/08, D/024648/09, D/030509/10, and A1/035720/11); Departament d'Universitats, Recerca i Societat de la Informacio de la Generalitat de Catalunya, Spain 2009SGR685 (J.R.) and 2009SGR385 (J.G. and E. A.); and National Institutes of Health, Public Health Service award 1K01TW007405 (T.J.O.); J.R. has a fellowship from program I3 of the ISCIII (grant no. CES11/012)

Monitoring of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is of great importance due to the frequency of strains becoming increasingly resistant to antibiotics. This review, using a public health focused approach, aimed to understand and describe the current status of AMR in Morocco in relation to WHO priority pathogens and treatment guidelines.

Carbapenem-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii is the top-ranked pathogen in the World Health Organization priority list of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. It emerged as a global pathogen due to the successful expansion of a few epidemic lineages, or international clones (ICs), producing acquired class D carbapenemases (OXA-type). During the past decade, however, reports regarding IC-I isolates in Latin America are scarce and are non-existent for IC-II and IC-III isolates. This study evaluates the molecular mechanisms of carbapenem resistance and the epidemiology of 80 non-duplicate clinical samples of A. baumannii collected from February 2014 through April 2016 at two tertiary care hospitals in Lima. Almost all isolates were carbapenem-resistant (97.5%), and susceptibility only remained high for colistin (95%). Pulsed-field gel electrophoresis showed two main clusters spread between both h...