Manuel Krone (Würzburg / DE), Vera Rauschenberger (Würzburg / DE), Vera Blaschke (Würzburg / DE), Heike Claus (Würzburg / DE), Oliver Kurzai (Würzburg / DE), Stefanie Kampmeier (Würzburg / DE)
Question
Ralstonia pickettii is a gram-negative rod which may cause invasive infections due to the use of contaminated liquid medical products.
Methods
After R. pickettii was detected in blood cultures and a stem cell product from three patients in a tertiary-care hospital in Germany, environmental sampling was performed and subsequently whole genome sequencing (WGS) of the three patient isolates and two water isolates from the environment.
Results
Core Genome Multi Locus Sequence Typing (cgMLST) analysis showed that the three patient isolates were closely related and there was a large number of allele differences to the environmental isolates. The genomic comparison of the patients" isolates with a R. pickettii strain from an outbreak in Australia suspected to be caused by contaminated saline produced in India revealed only few differences.
Conclusions
Our data and information point towards an ongoing risk by medical products contaminated with R. pickettii potentially distributed worldwide. Identification of medical products applied to patients with R. pickettii infections and timely whole genome sequencing of all available R. pickettii isolates may help to identify the source of this potentially global outbreak.