Agricultural Injury-Associated Chromobacterium violaceum Infection in a Bangladeshi Farmer

Abstract

Chromobacterium violaceum is an emerging environmental pathogen that causes life-threatening infection in humans and animals. In October 2017, a Bangladeshi farmer was hospitalized with high-grade fever due to an agricultural injury-related wound infection. Bacteriological and 16S rRNA gene investigation detected C. violaceum in the wound discharge. The patient recovered successfully after a combination treatment with meropenem and ciprofloxacin, followed by prolonged medication to avoid recurrence. We strongly propose to incorporate C. violaceum in the differential diagnosis of wound and skin infections occurring in tropical and subtropical regions, especially when the injury was exposed to soil or sluggish water.

Figure 1.

Chromobacterium violaceum RDN09 produces violet-pigmented colonies with β-hemolysis reaction on a blood agar plate. This figure appears in color at www.ajtmh.org.

Figure 2.

Phylogenetic tree based on 16S rRNA partial sequences, illustrating the homology between the 16S rRNA gene sequence of Chromobacterium violaceum RDN09 (black box) and other reported 16S rRNA gene sequences of C. violaceum retrieved from the National Center for Biotechnology Information gene bank (black diamond). Mega 6 software package was used to construct the phylogenetic tree following the neighbor-joining method with 1,000 bootstraps. Percentage bootstrap support is indicated by values at each node (values < 50 are omitted). As an out-group, we used Staphylococcus aureus strain Jaa1.