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Abstract
Salmonella enterica serovar Agona is an enteric pathogen isolated from food animals. Salmonella Agona has routinely appeared on the list of top10 most commonly isolated Salmonella serovars from both humans and animals. This underlines the importance of S. Agona as a potential source of food-borne illness in humans. This thesis represents a phenotypic (antimicrobial susceptibility profiles) and genotypic (pulsed field gel electrophoresis, plasmid analysis and integron analyses) characterization of S. Agona slaughter/processing isolates from cattle, chickens, turkeys, and swine submitted to the National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System from 1997 through 2003. Data from these studies suggest a shift in prevalence among sources, an increase in antimicrobial drug resistance to six of the 19 antimicrobials tested, relatedness between pulsed field gel electrophoresis patterns and antimicrobial resistance profiles, and an increased prevalence of large plasmids and class 1 integrons among multiple drug resistant isolates compared to pan-susceptible isolates.