Carbapenem Resistance Conferred by OXA-48 in K2-ST86 Hypervirulent <i>Klebsiella pneumoniae</i>, France
Racha Beyrouthy, Guillaume Dalmasso, A. Birer, Frédéric Robin, Richard Bonnet
Abstract
K lebsiella pneumoniae is a threat to human health because of the emergence of hypervirulent K. pneumoniae, which has caused severe community-acquired infections, and classical multidrug-resistant K. pneumoniae involved in hospital outbreaks (1). Classical K. pneumoniae generally lacks the virulence genes associated with invasive diseases (1) and belongs to successful clonal groups, such as sequence type (ST) 11 and ST258 (2). Most hypervirulent K. pneumoniae isolates, which are mainly found in Asia (3,4), belong to the K1 and K2 capsular serotypes and are restricted to clonal complexes different from classical multidrug-resistant K. pneumoniae groups, such as K1-ST23, the most prevalent group (2). They rarely harbor acquired antimicrobial resistance genes but have virulence loci and a hypermucoviscous phenotype (5). We describe 2 hypermucoviscous K2-ST86 K. pneumoniae (positive string test) resistant to carbapenems isolated in northern and southern France.