Bartonella henselae and B. koehlerae DNA in Birds

Hillerød, Denmark) by agglutination with latex beads and type-specific serum and by microscopic determination of capsule swelling with type-specific serum (SSI Diagnostika, Hillerød, Denmark), according to the manufacturer’s instructions. These methods gave concordant results. Etests (bioMérieux, Solna, Sweden) demonstrated that the isolate was sensitive to all antimicrobial drugs tested; MIC was 0.125 mg/L for cefotaxim and 0.016 mg/L for benzylpenicillin. The isolate was tested for known virulence-associated genes sly, mrp, and epf with PCR, as described (9). PCR fragments of predicted sizes were obtained with primer hybridizing to sly and mrp but not with primers hybridizing to epf. A serotype 2 isolate (kindly provided by Susanne Sauer at SSI) was used as a positive control for the epf primers. S. suis is an emerging human pathogen, but reports of human infections caused by serotypes other than serotype 2 remain scarce. This case demonstrates that S. suis of serotype 5, which is a serotype routinely isolated from deceased pigs (10), can cause invasive infections in humans. The course of the described infection was relatively favorable, and the patient did not show signs of a systemic inflammatory response syndrome or of meningitis. Preexisting osteoarthritis of the right hip might have had diminished local defenses, thereby enabling colonization of the hip area by bacteria that had entered the bloodstream through the wound on the patient’s hand. The isolate we recovered possessed sly and mrp genes, which encode the virulence-associated suilysin and muraminidase-released proteins, but clearly other factors are also of importance for determining the virulence of individual S. suis isolates.