The crisis in antibiotic resistance has resulted in an increasing fear of the emergence of untreatable organisms. Resistance to the glycopeptide antibiotic vancomycin in the enterococci, and the spread of these pathogens throughout the environment, has shown that this scenario is a matter of fact rather than fiction. The basis for vancomycin resistance is the manufacture of the depsipeptide D-A...

Enterococcus faecalis BM4405 was resistant to low levels of vancomycin (MIC, 16 microg/ml) and was susceptible to teicoplanin (MIC, 0.5 microg/ml). No PCR product was obtained when the total DNA of this clinical isolate was used as a template with primers specific for glycopeptide resistance genes vanA, vanB, vanC, and vanD. However, a 604-bp PCR fragment was obtained when V1 and V2 degenerate ...

VRE species are an increasingly important and universal problem in intensive care units and hematology-oncology departments due to the spread of glycopeptide resistance. Rapid and accurate identification of VRE is therefore crucial. The intent of this study was to compare the diagnostic performance of a real-time PCR test, the BD GeneOhm VanR assay (GeneXpert vanA/ vanB, Cepheid, USA), with con...

The distribution characteristics of vancomycin-resistant enterococci (VRE) and the resistance of enterococcus isolates to various antibiotics were investigated in Yae River, which flows through Miyazaki city, Japan. The prevalence of VRE among specimens collected from the urban river basin using mEI agar was 0.9% (2 of 226 enterococcal isolates). In the 333 enterococcal isolates obtained using ...

To determine patterns of antimicrobial susceptibility among enterococci and to assess molecular characteristics of vancomycin-resistant enterococci, 157 clinical blood isolates of enterococci from 10 hospitals in Cincinnati, Ohio, were prospectively collected during a 6-month period from February to July 1995. The isolates included 108 (69%) E. faecalis isolates, 46 (29%) E. faecium isolates, a...

Over the last decade vancomycin-resistant enterococci (VRE) have emerged as nosocomial pathogens. The aim of this study was to determine the prevalence of VRE in clinical samples from hospitalized patients in the Canary Islands. From April to November 2000, 437 enterococci were isolated from patients hospitalized at the four main health care centers in those islands. Identification to the speci...

In this study the distribution of species and antimicrobial resistance among vancomycin resistant enterococci (VRE) recovered from clinical specimens obtained from five hospitals in Belgrade was analyzed. Strains were further characterized by pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE). Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) was used to investigate the presence of vanA and vanB genes and pathogenicity fac...

OBJECTIVE To perform molecular typing of vancomycin resistant Enterococcus spp. (VRE) strains endemic in various hospitals of Karachi, to characterize the mechanism of glycopeptide resistance and assess the genetic relatedness, for understanding its transmission locally. METHOD This was a cross sectional study conducted in the clinical and research laboratory of Aga Khan University Hospital (...

anA glycopeptide resistance is characterized by acquired nducible resistance to both vancomycin and teicoplanin, hereas the VanB phenotype is characterized by variable evels of resistance to vancomycin but susceptibility to eicoplanin.1 Here we report a vancomycin-resistant Enterooccus faecium (VREFm) strain with VanB phenotype-vanA enotype incongruence. In the course of antimicrobial susceptib...