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. 2010 Jun;31(6):640-2.
doi: 10.1086/652774.

Pseudo-outbreak of Clostridium sordellii infection following probable cross-contamination in a hospital clinical microbiology laboratory

David M Aronoff  1 , Tennille Thelen, Seth T Walk, Kathleen Petersen, Julia Jackson, Sylvia Grossman, James Rudrik, Duane W Newton, Carol E Chenoweth
Affiliations

Pseudo-outbreak of Clostridium sordellii infection following probable cross-contamination in a hospital clinical microbiology laboratory

David M Aronoff et al. Infect Control Hosp Epidemiol. 2010 Jun.

Abstract

We report a pseudo-outbreak of infection caused by Clostridium sordellii, an uncommon human pathogen. The pseudo-outbreak involved 6 patients and was temporally associated with a change by the clinical microbiology laboratory in the protocol of handling anaerobic culture specimens. All isolates were genetically indistinguishable from a laboratory reference strain used for quality control.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
(A) Chronological history of C. sordellii pseudo-outbreak. The number of positive cultures for C. sordellii is plotted against time. Months are broken into quarters along the x-axis. (B) Pulsed field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) analysis of C. sordellii isolates. PFGE using the restriction enzyme ApaI was performed on genomic DNA from C. sordellii isolates as detailed in the Materials and Methods section. Lane 1, clinical strain DA-108 not involved in this pseudo-outbreak; lane 2, reference strain ATCC9714; lanes 3-8, clinical C. sordellii isolates (1-6) involved in this pseudo-outbreak; lane 9, digest control.
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