During active surveillance at the Mediterranean Institute for Transplantation and Advanced Specialized Therapies (ISMETT, Palermo, Italy) with the CARBA screening medium, five pairs of Klebsiella pneumoniae carbapenemase (KPC)-producing K. pneumoniae and Escherichia coli strains were isolated in each of five colonized patients. In each patient, lateral gene transfer was demonstrated by comparin...

References 1 Yigit H, Queenan AM, Anderson GJ et al. Novel carbapenem-hydrolyzing b-lactamase KPC-1 from a carbapenem-resistant strain of Klebsiella pneumoniae. Antimicrob Agents Chemother 2001; 45: 1151–61. 2 Nordmann P, Naas T, Poirel L. Global spread of carbapenemaseproducing Enterobacteriaceae. Emerg Infect Dis 2011; 17: 1791–8. 3 Naas T, Cuzon G, Truong HV et al. Role of ISKpn7 and deletio...

References 1 Cuzon G, Naas T, Truong H et al. Worldwide diversity of Klebsiella pneumoniae that produces b-lactamase bla KPC-2 gene. related Klebsiella pneumoniae isolates of sequence type 258 producing plasmid-mediated KPC carbapenemase in Norway and Sweden. et al. Plasmid-mediated carbapenem-hydrolyzing enzyme KPC-2 and ArmA 16S rRNA methylase conferring high-level aminoglycoside resistance i...

OBJECTIVES To identify risk factors for KPC-producing Klebsiella pneumoniae (KPC-Kp) enteric colonization at intensive care unit (ICU) admission. Recently, the emergence and spread of KPC-producing Enterobacteriaceae in healthcare facilities has become an important issue. Understanding the extent of the reservoir in ICUs may be important for targeted intervention. METHODS A prospective observ...

Sixteen different variants (KPC-2 to KPC-17) in the KPC family have been reported, and most current studies are focusing on KPC-2 and KPC-3. The KPC-15 variant, which isolated from Klebsiella pneumoniae in a Chinese hospital, was a recently discovered KPC enzyme. To compare the characteristics of KPC-15 and KPC-2, the variants were determined by susceptibility testing, PCR amplification and seq...

An isolate of Proteus mirabilis recovered from blood cultures of a diabetic patient was shown to be resistant to imipenem, meropenem, and ertapenem by disk diffusion susceptibility testing. Amplification of whole-cell and/or plasmid DNA recovered from the isolate with primers specific for the bla(KPC) carbapenemase gene produced an amplicon of the expected size which was confirmed to be bla(KPC...

We report the first outbreak caused by colistin-resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae producing KPC-3 carbapenamase in two Italian hospitals. This spread occurred in 1 month, and was caused by eight colistin-resistant and carbapenem-resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae isolates from eight patients. A further three isolates were obtained from the intestinal tract and pharyngeal colonization. All isolates w...

It is more convenient and practical to collect rectal swabs than stool specimens to study carriage of colon pathogens. In this study, we examined the ability to use rectal swabs rather than stool specimens to quantify Klebsiella pneumoniae carbapenemase (KPC)-producing carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE). We used a quantitative real-time PCR (qPCR) assay to determine the concentration...

Recent years have shown the emergence and dissemination of isolates of Enterobacteriaceae producing carbapenemases in different parts of the world (3). In many cases, those carbapenemases were KPC -lactamases (5). Those enzymes hydrolyze all -lactams, including carbapenems at a significant level, with the exception of cephamycins. The blaKPC-like genes have been reported most often from enterob...

Transmission of antibiotic resistance genes may be mediated by a variety of molecular mechanisms, from mobility of small genetic elements to clonal spread. Since 1997, the carbapenem-hydrolyzing enzyme Klebsiella pneumoniae carbapenemase (KPC) has spread in the United States and across the world, mainly via a single K. pneumoniae clone, sequence type 258. By tracking the trail of dissemination ...