-Epidemiology and Characterization of Clinical Isolates, Slovenia, 2006-2020.

is the causative agent of severe Legionnaires' disease (LD). Although an increasing number of LD cases have been observed, published data from Slovenia are very limited and data on molecular epidemiology are even scarcer. The present retrospective study (2006-2020) reports the results of the microbiological diagnosis of LD, as well as the epidemiology and characterization of the clinical isolates. We tested urine samples from 15,540 patients with pneumonia symptoms for infection by urine antigen test, of which 717 (4.6%) tested positive. Isolation of was successfully performed from 88 clinical specimens, with 82 (93.2%) being identified as sg 1 and six (6.8%) as sg 2-14. Sequence-based typing (SBT) identified 33 different sequence types (STs), the most frequent being ST1 and ST23. Sequence type 1 mainly comprised isolates belonging to the Philadelphia subgroup, and ST23 mostly to Allentown/France. The standard SBT scheme, as well as Dresden phenotyping for presented a high diversity among isolates.