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The role of arbitrarily primed PCR in identifying the source of an outbreak of Legionnaires' disease.

Authors :
Whitney CG
Hofmann J
Pruckler JM
Benson RF
Fields BS
Bandyopadhyay U
Donnally EF
Giorgio-Almonte C
Mermel LA
Boland S
Matyas BT
Breiman RF
Source :
Journal of clinical microbiology [J Clin Microbiol] 1997 Jul; Vol. 35 (7), pp. 1800-4.
Publication Year :
1997

Abstract

An outbreak of community-acquired Legionnaires' disease (LD) occurred in Providence, R.I., in fall 1993. To find the outbreak source, exposures of 17 case patients were compared to those of 33 matched controls. Case patients were more likely than controls to have visited a section of downtown (area A) during the 2 weeks before illness (11 [65%] versus 9 [27%]; matched odds ratio, 6.5; P = 0.01). Water samples were cultured from 27 aerosol-producing devices within area A. Legionella pneumophila serogroup 1 isolates underwent monoclonal antibody (MAb) subtyping and arbitrarily primed PCR (AP-PCR). All four L. pneumophila serogroup 1 isolates available from case patients who visited area A had identical MAb and AP-PCR patterns. Among 14 environmental isolates, 5 had MAb patterns that matched the case patient isolates, but only 1 had a matching AP-PCR pattern. This investigation implicates a cooling tower in area A as the outbreak source and illustrates the usefulness of AP-PCR for identifying sources of LD outbreaks.

Details

Language :
English
ISSN :
0095-1137
Volume :
35
Issue :
7
Database :
MEDLINE
Journal :
Journal of clinical microbiology
Publication Type :
Academic Journal
Accession number :
9196197
Full Text :
https://doi.org/10.1128/jcm.35.7.1800-1804.1997