Surgical Management of Equine Inguinal Hernia

A 14-year-old Lusitano horse with signs of abdominal pain was referred to a referral equine hospital in Lisbon in June 2016 and diagnosed with a small intestinal inguinal hernia. Laparotomy was performed, and the incarcerated portion of non-viable small intestine was resected under general anesthesia. The horse had never been subjected to antimicrobial therapy before and was treated with penicillin at a dose of 22 000 UI/kg for 7 days and gentamicin at a dose of 6,6 mg/kg for 5 days post-surgery. The patient developed a surgical site infection of the abdominal wall that was detected on day 4 post-surgery. A swab sample was collected from the site and further streaked in Blood and MacConkey agar. After a 24 h incubation at 37°C, pure bacterial cultures were obtained, posteriorly identified as K. pneumoniae using API 20 E test (Biomérieux, Marcy-Étoile, France).
The Laboratory of Microbiology of the Faculty of Pharmacy of the University of Porto provided the seven ST348 human isolates (Rodrigues et al., 2016 (link), 2017 (link) and unpublished data).