Abstract

Outbreaks of Kingella kingae invasive infections have recently been reported in day care centers. Pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) and multilocus sequence typing (MLST) revealed that although the invasive strains had widespread dissemination in the day care population, less virulent strains were also circulating in the facilities. However, these typing tools are costly, time-consuming, and labor-intensive and provide delayed results. A study was conducted to assess the performance of a rapid and cost-effective genotyping tool targeting the DNA uptake sequence (DUS) in the investigation of outbreaks of K. kingae disease. DUS typing (DUST) patterns of each strain from 7 different clusters were compared to distinguish genotypically linked strains from others. PFGE and, when available, MLST results were used as gold standards. DUST was assessed on 80 K. kingae isolates from Nir-Itzhak (n = 14), Tel-Nof (n = 14), Palmahim (n = 5), Umm-al-Fahm (n = 7), Eilat (n = 8), Nevatim (n = 15) in Israel and Paris, France (n = 17). A unique DUST pattern was involved in the Nir-Itzhak, Palmahim, Umm-al-Fahm, and Paris episodes. Two DUST patterns were found in Eilat, whereas at least 3 were identified in the Tel-Nof and Nevatim episodes. In total, 11 (13.8%) children carried a K. kingae isolate that differed from the outbreak strain. These results were concordant with those obtained with the traditional PFGE and MLST methods. DUST appears to be sensitive and specific in distinguishing the invasive outbreak strain from others in asymptomatic carriers and could be useful to limit unnecessary exposure of the entire day care population to selective antibiotic pressure.