Authors : Yuanzhi Wang, Ke Zhang, Yali Zhang, Hui Wang, Fei Guo, Lin Zhang, Hui Zhang, Lijuan CaoBuyun, Cui , Chengyao Li, Li Yuan, Wanjiang Zhang, Ze Xu and Chuangfu Chen
Abstract: An outbreak of brucellosis occurred in students on field practice at sheep farm in 2005 at Shihezi, Xinjiang Province, the North-West of China. Five of 7 (71.4%) students were seropositive, showing titers ≥1:160 IU mL-1 in STAT and diagnosed as acute brucellosis with physical examination. To characterize Brucella isolates from the outbreak, the research including face to face investigation, Brucella isolation, multiple locus VNTR-16 analysis (MLVA-16) and genome sequencing were carried out. The investigation showed 42.5% (1,293/3,042) of ewes are sero-positive with RBPT and almost half of ewes aborted. Although, no bacteria were isolated from student blood samples, five individual colonies were isolated from aborted sheep fetuses and were identified as B. melitensis biovar 3 by conventional microbiological tests. MLVA-16 typing indicated that the isolates were clustered in the East Mediterranean with genotype 42. They were similar to wild strains from Guangdong in 2008 and Inner Mongolia in 1994 and 1995. They were most close to strain bru0261 from Pakistan student studying in Germany. Genome sequence and phylogenomic tree showed that pathogen in this study was close to Chinese wild and vaccine strains such as B. melitensis M28, M5-90. Researchers first report pathogens isolated in 1980 and 2005 are genotype 42 containing novel MLVA-16 patterns (1-5-3-13-2-2-3-2-4-20-8-8-4-3-7-7) compared to that both in China and other countries.
Yuanzhi Wang, Ke Zhang, Yali Zhang, Hui Wang, Fei Guo, Lin Zhang, Hui Zhang, Lijuan CaoBuyun, Cui , Chengyao Li, Li Yuan, Wanjiang Zhang, Ze Xu and Chuangfu Chen, 2013. Characterization of Brucella Isolates from an Outbreak of Brucellosis after a Field Practice Without Protective Measures. Journal of Animal and Veterinary Advances, 12: 948-953.