Clostridium difficile–related Hospitalizations among US Adults, 2006

salons. M. conceptionense belongs to the M. fortuitum group and was isolated in a posttraumatic osteitis infl ammation (10). M. chimaera belongs to MAC and has been isolated only in patients with pulmonary disorders but not from immunocompromised patients. The authors reported that the isolate showed unusually high virulence. We isolated this species for the fi rst time in an environmental sample. It could belong to the transitory fl ora of the H cooling tower because it was isolated only once in our samples. Cooling towers already had been investigated for slow-growing mycobacteria (1), and our study showed they also can be an environmental source of rapidly growing NTM pathogens. In our procedure for amebal co-cultures, incubation cannot last >10 days because amebae do not survive longer in Page’s amebal saline buffer. Moreover, agar plates were incubated for 10 days only, which explains why we could recover only rapidly growing mycobacteria. The cooling towers, already known as a source of dissemination of Legionella spp., may disseminate mycobacteria in aerosols and be a previously nonrecognized source of infection.