Infection with Leptospira kirschneri Serovar Mozdok: First Report from the Southern Hemisphere

Abstract

Leptospirosis is a global zoonosis caused by pathogenic Leptospira spp. In this study, we characterized two Leptospira kirschneri serogroup Pomona serovar Mozdok isolates, one obtained from a dog and the other from a patient with severe leptospirosis, 4 years later. Histopathological analysis showed that both isolates caused severe tissue damage when used to infect hamsters. While L. kirschneri serogroup Pomona serovar Mozdok is endemic in animals in Europe, there is only one report of human leptospirosis in the literature. Although strains belonging to L. kirschneri serogroup Pomona have been identified in cases of human leptospirosis in Europe, serovar Mozdok has not yet been implicated. The 4-year interval between isolations and the fact that this is the first report of serovar Mozdok as the causative agent of human leptospirosis in the southern hemisphere, demonstrates its epidemiological importance to public health. Moreover, the presence of serovar Mozdok in Brazil has the potential to affect vaccine and diagnostic test development.

Figure 1.

Dendrogram constructed from the concatenated sequences of 7 multilocus sequence typing (MLST) loci. Patient and animal isolates from the city of Pelotas are presented as well as two reference strains (L1-130 and 5621). Branch length is displayed next to each branch. The evolutionary distances were computed using the maximum composite likelihood method and are shown as the number of base substitutions per site. The sequences used to construct this dendrogram were retrieved from http://leptospira.mlst.net/portable/portable.xls and concatenated on http://leptospira.mlst.net/sql/concatenate/default.asp.