Pandemic Spread of an O3:K6 Clone of <i>Vibrio parahaemolyticus</i> and Emergence of Related Strains Evidenced by Arbitrarily Primed PCR and <i>toxRS</i> Sequence Analyses

Vibrio parahaemolyticus O3:K6 strains responsible for the increase in the number of cases of diarrhea in Calcutta, India, beginning in February 1996 and those isolated from Southeast Asian travelers beginning in 1995 were shown to belong to a unique clone characterized by possession of the tdh gene but not the trh gene and by unique arbitrarily primed PCR (AP-PCR) profiles (J. Okuda, M. Ishibashi, E. Hayakawa, T. Nishino, Y. Takeda, A. K. Mukhopadhyay, S. Garg, S. K. Bhattacharya, G. B. Nair, and M. Nishibuchi, J. Clin. Microbiol. 35:3150-3155, 1997). Evidence supporting a hypothesis that this clone emerged only recently and is spreading to many countries was obtained in this study. Of 227 strains isolated in a hospital in Bangladesh between…