Authors: Roy, Subarna¹; Dutta, Basabjit²; Ghosh, Asit Ranjan¹; Sugunan, A. P.¹; Nandy, Ranjan Kumar²; Bhattacharya, Sujit Kumar²; Sehgal, Subhash C.¹

Source: Tropical Medicine & International Health, Volume 10, Number 6, June 2005 , pp. 604-611(8)

Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Abstract:

Summary

A large outbreak of acute watery diarrhoea involving all age groups of mongoloid tribal aborigines occurred during October–November, 2002 in the Nancowry group of Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Indian Ocean. Twenty-one of the 67 stool samples from 67 patients were positive for toxigenic Vibrio cholerae O1, serotype Ogawa biotype El Tor, which showed striking similarity in its antibiogram with some of the strains of V. cholerae O1 Serotype Ogawa biotype El Tor isolated in Kolkata. The Nancowry and Kolkata isolates were compared with molecular tools involving random amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD) fingerprinting, ribotyping and pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE). RAPD fingerprinting and ribotyping techniques revealed that all the V. cholerae strains associated with the outbreak in these islands were clonal in nature and identical to a population of isolates obtained from Kolkata since 1993. PFGE could discriminate within these Kolkata isolates further and established that a particular subtype of this population reached the remote Nancowry islands and was responsible for the outbreak.

Keywords: cholera; Vibrio cholerae; epidemic; clonal spread

Document Type: Research article

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-3156.2005.01423.x

Affiliations: 1: Regional Medical Research Centre (RMRC), Port Blair, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, India 2: National Institute of Cholera and Enteric Diseases, Kolkata, West Bengal, India

Publication date: 2005-06-01

Related content

• In this: publication
• By this: publisher
• In this Subject: Internal Medicine
• By this author: Roy, Subarna ;  Dutta, Basabjit ;  Ghosh, Asit Ranjan ;  Sugunan, A. P. ;  Nandy, Ranjan Kumar ;  Bhattacharya, Sujit Kumar ;  Sehgal, Subhash C.

Website © Publishing Technology. Article copyright remains with the publisher, society or author(s) as specified within the article.

• Terms and conditions
• Privacy policy
• Information for advertisers