Llarena Ann-Katrin, Kivistö Rauni
Food Safety Unit, Department of Paraclinical Sciences, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Norwegian University of Life Sciences, 1430 Ås, Norway.
Department of Food Hygiene and Environmental Health, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, University of Helsinki, FI-00790 Helsinki, Finland.
Pathogens. 2020 Oct 22;9(11):868. doi: 10.3390/pathogens9110868.
() is the most common cause of human bacterial gastroenteritis in the world. Food-borne campylobacteriosis is thought to be commonly caused by the handling and consumption of undercooked chicken meat, but the epidemiology of this disease is complex and remains poorly characterized, especially in the Nordic countries. Here, we used state-of-the-art methods in genetic epidemiology combined with patient background and temporal association data to trace domestically acquired human infections ( = 50) to chicken meat, in a midsize Nordic town in Finland during a seasonal peak. Although 59.2% of the human isolates shared a sequence type (ST) with a chicken batch slaughtered prior to the onset of disease, further analysis at the whole-genome level (core genome and whole-genome multilocus sequence typing, cgMLST and wgMLST, respectively) traced a mere nine cases (18.4%) to fresh chicken meat. Human isolates also shared genotypes with isolates collected from chicken batches slaughtered after the onset of the human disease, highlighting the role of alternative transmission pathways from chickens to humans besides the food chain, or a shared third source. The high resolution offered by wgMLST, combined with simple metadata, offers a more accurate way to trace sporadic cases to possible sources and reveal disseminated outbreak clustering in time, confirming the importance of complementing epidemiological investigations with molecular epidemiological data.
（）是全球人类细菌性肠胃炎最常见的病因。食源性弯曲杆菌病通常被认为是由处理和食用未煮熟的鸡肉引起的，但这种疾病的流行病学情况复杂，仍未得到充分描述，尤其是在北欧国家。在此，我们运用遗传流行病学的先进方法，结合患者背景和时间关联数据，在芬兰一个中型北欧城镇季节性高峰期，将50例国内获得性人类感染追溯至鸡肉。尽管59.2%的人类分离株与疾病发作前屠宰的一批鸡肉共享一种序列类型（ST），但在全基因组水平（分别为核心基因组和全基因组多位点序列分型，即cgMLST和wgMLST）进行的进一步分析仅将9例（18.4%）追溯至新鲜鸡肉。人类分离株还与在人类疾病发作后屠宰的鸡肉批次中收集的分离株共享基因型，这突出了除食物链之外，鸡与人之间其他传播途径的作用，或者存在一个共同的第三来源。wgMLST提供的高分辨率，结合简单的元数据，为将散发病例追溯至可能的来源并及时揭示传播性暴发聚集提供了一种更准确的方法，证实了用分子流行病学数据补充流行病学调查的重要性。
