Department Infectious Diseases, Istituto Superiore di Sanità, Rome, Italy.
Agency for Health Protection of Metropolitan Area of Milan, Milan, Italy.
Euro Surveill. 2021 Jun;26(25). doi: 10.2807/1560-7917.ES.2021.26.25.2001961.
In September 2018 in Brescia province, northern Italy, an outbreak of Legionnaires' disease (LD) caused by serogroup 2 () occurred. The 33 cases (two fatal) resided in seven municipalities along the Chiese river. All cases were negative by urinary antigen test (UAT) and most were diagnosed by real-time PCR and serology. In only three cases, respiratory sample cultures were positive, and was identified and typed as sequence type (ST)1455. In another three cases, nested sequence-based typing was directly applied to respiratory samples, which provided allelic profiles highly similar to ST1455. An environmental investigation was undertaken immediately and water samples were collected from private homes, municipal water systems, cooling towers and the river. Overall, 533 environmental water samples were analysed and 34 were positive for . Of these, only three samples, all collected from the Chiese river, were ST1455. If and how the river water could have been aerosolised causing the LD cases remains unexplained. This outbreak, the first to our knowledge caused by , highlights the limits of UAT for LD diagnosis, underlining the importance of adopting multiple tests to ensure that serogroups other than serogroup 1, as well as other species, are identified.
2018 年 9 月,意大利北部布雷西亚省暴发了军团病(LD)疫情,其病原体为血清群 2 ()。7 个市镇的 33 例(2 例死亡)病例居住在沿 Chiese 河的地区。所有病例的尿抗原检测(UAT)均为阴性,大多数病例通过实时 PCR 和血清学检测进行诊断。只有 3 例呼吸道样本培养呈阳性,鉴定并分型为序列型(ST)1455。另有 3 例,直接对呼吸道样本进行嵌套序列基于分型,提供了与 ST1455 高度相似的等位基因谱。立即开展了环境调查,并从私人住宅、市政供水系统、冷却塔和河流中采集了水样。共分析了 533 份环境水样,其中 34 份呈阳性。其中,只有来自 Chiese 河的 3 个样本为 ST1455。河水如何被气溶胶化从而导致 LD 病例仍无法解释。本起疫情,据我们所知是首次由引起,凸显了 UAT 对 LD 诊断的局限性,强调了采用多种检测方法以确保鉴定除血清群 1 以外的血清群以及其他 物种的重要性。