Artikel
Molecular Epidemiology of Bacteremia Caused by B. Cereus in Pediatric Cancer Ward
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Veröffentlicht: | 3. Juni 2014 |
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Objectives: B. cereus has been reported as a cause of serious nosocomial infection in hematology-oncology patients. In our pediatric cancer ward, only one or two episodes of B. cereus associated bacteremia have been observed. However, a sudden rise in number of patients with bacteremia caused by B. cereus was observed by autumn of 2013. This study was performed to investigate the molecular epidemiology of B. cereus that caused increased number of bacteremia in our pediatric cancer ward.
Methods: The pediatric cancer patients who developed bacteremia caused by B. cereus were identified at the department of pediatrics, Samsung Medical Center, Seoul, Korea from January 2001 to October 2013. Available isolates including 5 isolates from 2013 were further tested by multilocus sequence typing (MLST). A retrospective chart review was performed.
Results: A total of 16 patients developed bacteremia caused by B. cereus occurred during the study period. Usually it occurred in only one or two patients per year before 2013. However, in 2013, a sudden rise in number of patients with B. cereus bacteremia was observed. In addition, there were clusters of patients in July and in October; three patients developed bacteremia within one week in July and October, respectively. Therefore, an outbreak from a common source of infection was suspected. However, MLST revealed multiple ST types without any consistent patterns. Before 2013, tested 5 isolates were ST18, ST26, ST177, ST147 like type, and ST219 like type. Isolates from 2013 were ST18, ST73, ST90, ST427, and ST34 like type.
Conclusions: MLST analyses showed variable ST type distribution of B. cereus isolates. Based on this molecular epidemiologic study, it is speculated that there is a low probability for epidemiological link among patients who developed B. cereus bacteremia.
Key words: B. cereus, multilocus sequence typing (MLST), pediatric, cancer patients