Pneumonia and septicemia caused by Burkholderia thailandensis in the United States

Abstract

Burkholderia thailandensis is closely related to Burkholderia pseudomallei, the causative agent of melioidosis. It is generally considered avirulent and previously has been reported to occur only in Southeast Asia. We report the first case of pneumonia and septicemia caused by B. thailandensis in the United States.

FIG. 1.

16S rRNA gene sequence analysis. The neighbor-joining phylogenetic tree of Burkholderia thailandensis strains was based on comparisons with 16S rRNA gene sequences of related bacteria. Pseudomonas aeruginosa DSM 50071 (GenBank accession no. X06684) was used as an outgroup for this analysis. Sequences were aligned and trimmed and gaps removed using the Wisconsin package, v. 10.3. Analysis was then done with MEGA 3.1 (Kimura 2-parameter, 1,000-step bootstrap) (http://www.megasoftware.net/). The bar indicates 2% sequence dissimilarity.

FIG. 2.

Multilocus sequence typing. The neighbor-joining phylogenetic tree was derived from concatenating all seven allele sequences for each MLST locus, using a representative set of STs from the MLST website (www.mlst.net). Analysis of concatenated sequences was done per Godoy et al. (8) using MEGA 3.1 (Kimura 2-parameter, 1,000-step bootstrap) (http://www.megasoftware.net/). The bar indicates 0.5% sequence dissimilarity.