Abstract
Listeriosis, caused by Listeria monocytogenes, is a severe food-borne infection. The nationwide surveillance in China concerning listeriosis is urgently needed. In the present study, 144 L. monocytogenes isolates were collected from the samples of blood, cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), and fetal membrane/placenta in China for 12 years from 2008 to 2019. We summarized these listeriosis patients’ demographical and clinical features and outcomes. The susceptibility profile for 12 antibiotics was also determined by the broth microdilution method. Multilocus sequence typing (MLST) and serogroups of these listeria isolates were analyzed to designate epidemiological types. We enrolled 144 cases from 29 healthcare centers, including 96 maternal-neonatal infections, 33 cases of bacteremia, 13 cases of neurolisteriosis, and two cutaneous listeriosis. There were 31 (59.6%) fetal loss in 52 pregnant women and four (9.8%) neonatal death in 41 newborns. Among the 48 nonmaternal-neonatal cases, 12.5% (6/48) died, 41.7% (20/48) were female, and 64.6% (31/48) occurred in those with significant comorbidities. By MLST, the strains were distinguished into 23 individual sequence types (STs). The most prevalent ST was ST87 (49 isolates, 34.0%), followed by ST1 (18, 12.5%), ST8 (10, 6.9%), ST619 (9, 6.3%), ST7 (7, 4.9%) and ST3 (7, 4.9%). Furthermore, all L. monocytogenes isolates were uniformly susceptible to penicillin, ampicillin, and meropenem. In summary, our study highlights a high genotypic diversity of L. monocytogenes strains causing clinical listeriosis in China. Furthermore, a high prevalence of ST87 and ST1 in the listeriosis should be noted.
Highlights
Listeriosis is a severe foodborne bacterial infection, caused by Listeria monocytogenes, an intracellular Gram-positive facultative bacillus (Vázquez-Boland et al, 2001; Moura et al, 2016; Charlier et al, 2017).Several sub-typing methods have been developed for understanding the microbiological characterization of L. monocytogenes isolates
Multilocus sequence typing (MLST), based on seven housekeeping genes, is a powerful and extensively-used epidemiological typing tool and allows for the classification of most clinical L. monocytogenes isolates into multiple clonal complexes (CCs) (Moura et al, 2016; Wu et al, 2016)
108 (75.0%) and 21 (14.6%) were positive in blood and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) culture, respectively, and there were eight cases in whom L. monocytogenes were isolated from both bloodstream and CSF, seen in Table 1 and Figure 2
Summary
Listeriosis is a severe foodborne bacterial infection, caused by Listeria monocytogenes, an intracellular Gram-positive facultative bacillus (Vázquez-Boland et al, 2001; Moura et al, 2016; Charlier et al, 2017). Several sub-typing methods have been developed for understanding the microbiological characterization of L. monocytogenes isolates. PCR serogrouping is often performed in the epidemiological investigation (Doumith et al, 2004; Leclercq et al, 2011). This PCR serogrouping method targets the DNA fragments ORF2110, ORF2819, lmo1118, and lmo0737, and classifies Listeria species into IIa, IIb, IIc, IVb, and L (Leclercq et al, 2011). L. monocytogenes can be classified into four distinct evolutionary lineages (denoted I to IV) with most isolates grouping into lineages I and II (Cardenas-Alvarez et al, 2019; Fan et al, 2019)
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