Novel Bartonella agent as cause of verruga peruana

Abstract

While studying chronic verruga peruana infections in Peru from 2003, we isolated a novel Bartonella agent, which we propose be named Candidatus Bartonella ancashi. This case reveals the inherent weakness of relying solely on clinical syndromes for diagnosis and underscores the need for a new diagnostic paradigm in developing settings.

Keywords: Bartonella; Bartonellosis; Candidatus Bartonella ancashi; Peru; bacteria; emerging infection; pathogen discovery; vector-borne infections; verruga peruana.

Figure 1

Clinical presentation of verruga peruana in 3-year-old boy, Peru, 2003.

Figure 2

Phylogeny for concatenated sequences of novel Bartonella isolate (boldface), including a 312-character fragment of gltA and a 589-character fragment of rpoB. The neighbor-joining tree method (1,000 bootstrap replicates) was employed using MEGA5 software (11), and the distances were calculated by using the Jukes-Cantor method, in which units are calculated as the number of base pair substitutions per site (10). Brucella melitensis was used as the outgroup.