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Pertussis is a vaccine-preventable disease, and its recent resurgence might be attributable to the emergence of strains that differ genetically from the vaccine strain. We describe a novel pertussis isolate-based surveillance system and a core genome multilocus sequence typing scheme to assess Bordetella pertussis genetic variability and investigate the increased incidence of pertussis in Austria. During 2018-2020, we obtained 123 B. pertussis isolates and typed them with the new scheme (2,983 targets and preliminary cluster threshold of <6 alleles). B. pertussis isolates in Austria differed genetically from the vaccine strain, both in their core genomes and in their vaccine antigen genes; 31.7% of the isolates were pertactin-deficient. We detected 8 clusters, 1 of them with pertactin-deficient isolates and possibly part of a local outbreak. National expansion of the isolate-based surveillance system is needed to implement pertussis-control strategies.

The history of humankind is marked by the constant adoption of new dietary habits affecting human physiology, metabolism, and even the development of nutrition-related disorders. Despite clear archaeological evidence for the shift from hunter-gatherer lifestyle to agriculture in Neolithic Europe [1], very little information exists on the daily dietary habits of our ancestors. By undertaking a complementary -omics approach combined with microscopy, we analyzed the stomach content of the Iceman, a 5,300-year-old European glacier mummy [2, 3]. He seems to have had a remarkably high proportion of fat in his diet, supplemented with fresh or dried wild meat, cereals, and traces of toxic bracken. Our multipronged approach provides unprecedented analytical depth, deciphering the nutritional habit, meal composition, and food-processing methods of this Copper Age individual., (Copyright © 2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.)

The increasing emergence of multi-resistant bacteria in healthcare settings, in the community and in the environment represents a major health threat worldwide. In 2016, we started a pilot project to investigate antimicrobial resistance in surface water. Bacteria were enriched, cultivated on selective chromogenic media and species identification was carried out by MALDI-TOF analysis. From a river in southern Austria a methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) was isolated. Whole genome sequence analysis identified the isolate as ST8, spa type t008, SCCmecIV, PVL and ACME positive, which are main features of CA-MRSA USA300. Whole genome based cgMLST of the water isolate and comparison to 18 clinical MRSA USA300 isolates from the Austrian national reference laboratory for coagulase positive staphylococci originating from 2004, 2005 and 2016 and sequences of 146 USA300 isolates arbitrarily retrieved from the Sequence Read Archive revealed a close relatedness to a clinical isolate from Austria. The presence of a CA-MRSA USA300 isolate in an aquatic environment might pose a public health risk by serving as a potential source of infection or a source for emergence of new pathogenic MRSA clones.