BACKGROUND & OBJECTIVE Group A streptococcus (GAS) causes a wide variety of life threatening diseases in developing countries like India. Characterization of GAS is therefore necessary for prevention and control of the disease. Genotypic analysis of GAS is largely lacking from India, therefore an attempt was made to study the genotype distribution of north Indian GAS isolates. METHODS Sixty c...

AIMS The accuracy of ribotyping and antibiotic resistance analysis (ARA) for prediction of sources of faecal bacterial pollution in an urban southern California watershed was determined using blinded proficiency samples. METHODS AND RESULTS Antibiotic resistance patterns and HindIII ribotypes of Escherichia coli (n = 997), and antibiotic resistance patterns of Enterococcus spp. (n = 3657) wer...

BACKGROUND Clostridium difficile (C. difficile) is a frequent cause of nosocomial infections. During last few years, the mortality rate of C. difficile infection (CDI) increased in healthcare facilities. This organism has become a major public health concern in developed nations. Because of the increasing incidence of acquired-CDI (CA-CDI) and notable genetic overlap between C. difficile isolat...

Eighty Vibrio cholerae O1 strains selected to represent the 1998-to-1999 history of the largest cholera epidemic in Kenya were characterized by ribotyping, antimicrobial susceptibility, and random amplified polymorphic DNA patterns. Except for 19 strains from 4 local outbreaks in North Eastern Province along the Somalia border, the other 61 strains from 25 outbreaks occurring in districts scatt...

Clinical Clostridium difficile isolates of patients with diarrhea or pseudomembranous colitis usually produce both toxin A and toxin B, but an increasing number of reports mention infections due to toxin A-negative, toxin B-positive (A(-)/B(+)) strains. Thirty-nine clinical toxin A(-)/B(+) isolates, and 12 other unrelated isolates were obtained from Canada, the United States, Poland, the United...

Within a 1-year period, six surgical-site infections (SSI) caused by Staphylococcus schleiferi were observed in the department of cardiac surgery of Ignatius Hospital, Breda, The Netherlands. Since outbreaks caused by this species of coagulase-negative staphylococci have not been described before, an extensive environmental survey and a case control study were performed in combination with mole...

Waters impacted by fecal pollution can exact high risks to human health and can result in financial losses due to closures of water systems used for recreation and for harvesting seafood. Identifying the sources of fecal pollution in water is paramount in assessing the potential human health risks involved as well as in assessing necessary remedial action. Recently, various researchers have use...

Amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP) was investigated for the differentiation of Corynebacterium diphtheriae isolates. Analysis using Taxotron revealed 10 distinct AFLP profiles among 57 isolates. Strains with ribotype patterns D1, D4, and D12 could not be distinguished; however, the technique discriminated isolates of ribotype patterns D3, D6, and D7 further. AFLP was rapid, fairly in...

Forty-four strains of Vibrio anguillarum serogroup 0 1 isolated from dead or diseased fish from several, mainly European, countries were selected for rRNA gene restriction pattern analysis. With HindIII, 6 different ribotypes were detected of which 1 profile was dominant with respect to geographical distribution as well as fish species. Also with EcoRI, 6 patterns were found; 1 profile was clea...