Epidemiology Research Today is a free monthly online journal that collates and summarizes the latest research about Epidemiology, including details on twin studies, statistics, environmental and genetic factors.

Molecular epidemiology of hospital-acquired vancomycin-resistant enterococci.

Abele-Horn M, Vogel U, Klare I, Konstabel C, Trabold R, Kurihara R, Witte W, Kreth W, Schlegel PG, Claus H

Institute for Hygiene and Microbiology, University of Würzburg, Germany. mhorn@hygiene.uni-wuerzburg.de

Vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus faecium strains are a significant cause of nosocomial infections in predisposed patients. Multiple-locus variable-number tandem repeat analysis (MLVA) has been validated recently by use of a global strain collection. In this report, we applied MLVA together with multilocus sequence typing (MLST) and pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) to type 14 isolates from three clusters of patients colonized or infected with vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus faecium and another 10 epidemiologically unrelated isolates from the same hospital. The clusters could be distinguished by all three typing methods, which proved to be concordant. PFGE patterns provided the highest resolution. We observed seven sequence types (ST), six MLVA types (MT), and nine distinct ST/MT combinations. The combination of MLST and MLVA may be an alternative to PFGE in hospital epidemiology, providing the benefits of high accuracy, reproducibility, and portability.

Published 7 November 2006 in J Clin Microbiol, 44(11): 4009-13.
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