Mycoplasma genitalium prevalence in Welsh sexual health patients: Low antimicrobial resistance markers and no association of symptoms to bacterial load.

Objectives: Mycoplasma genitalium (MG) is a common cause of sexually transmitted infection, however no prevalence data is available for Wales. MG was detected by qPCR (quantitative) as well as two separate SpeeDx commercial assays, and related to clinical symptoms, age, gender and sample type.

Methods: Cervical swabs, urethral swabs and/or urine were collected from 1000 patients at walk-in sexual health clinics at 3 Welsh health centres from October 2017-October 2018. Extracted DNA was investigated to determine concordance between an in-house quantitative PCR, SpeeDx ResistancePlus® MG and the SpeeDx MG + parC (beta 2) assays; mutations in parC were substantiated by Sanger sequencing.

Results: MG was detected in 17/600 female patients (2.7%) and 13/400 (3.5%) male patients, with a 100% concordance between in-house qPCR and both SpeeDx assays. Macrolide resistance was low (relative to other studies), but more common in males (4/13; 30.8%) than females (2/17; 11.8%) and the only fluoroquinolone resistant sample (3.4% overall) was also macrolide resistant and detected from an MSM. Vaginitis was clinically apparent in 12/17 MG-positive females (2 with additional cervicitis, 1 with additional pelvic inflammatory disease), while 7 MG-positive males were asymptomatic. MG bacterial load did not correlate to clinical symptoms and females (4559 ± 1646/ml) had significantly lower MG load than males (84,714 ± 41,813/ml; p = 0.0429).

Conclusions: MG prevalence and antibiotic resistance in Welsh sexual health clinics is low. MG bacterial load did not correlate to clinical presentation, men have higher MG load/ml in urine than women, genders have different age bias for MG prevalence and urine and swabs are equivalent for detecting MG.