ABSTRACT
The present work was conducted to compare the occurrence of Escherichia coli possessing virulence and ESBL genes in backyard and farmed poultry. Three hundred and sixty samples from the poultry kept in backyard system and 120 samples from the farmed birds were collected from West Bengal, India. Among the E. coli isolates of backyard poultry [O2, O10, O25, O55, O60, O106, UT], none of them possessed any of the Shiga toxin genes and eight E. coli isolates [8/272; 2.9%] harboured eaeA gene alone. Whereas among the E. coli isolated from the farmed poultry [O17, O20, O22, O102, O114, O119, rough, UT], four isolates [4/78, 5.1%] harboured stx[1]/stx[2] gene and 11 isolates [11/78, 14.1%] possessed eaeA gene. None of the E. coli isolates from the backyard poultry harboured any studied ESBL gene. Whereas 29.4% of E. coli isolates from the farmed poultry were found to possess the ESBL genes