Fig. 4

Patterns of detection of S. aureus spa types in veterinarians categorized as permanent carriers (a) and intermittent carriers (b). Missing samples are indicated as ‘M’, white spaces indicate culture negative events; white dots signify methicillin resistant isolates (typically 2 isolates typed per month). Yellow boxes in (a) indicate true persistent carriers. Colors also reflect the MSLT type of the major sequence types being ST398 (blue shades), ST5 (red shades), and ST9 (green shades)