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Journal of Clinical Microbiology, June 1998, p. 1494-1500, Vol. 36, No. 6
Laboratoire des Aspergillus,
Received 20 November 1997/Returned for modification 15 January
1998/Accepted 9 March 1998
Fingerprinting of more than 700 clinical and environmental isolates
of Aspergillus fumigatus from four differential hospital settings was undertaken with a dispersed repeated DNA sequence. The
analysis of the environmental isolates showed that the airborne A. fumigatus population is extremely diverse, with 85% of
the strains being represented as a single genotype isolated once. The
remaining 15% of the strains were isolated several times and were able
to persist for several months in the same hospital environment. No
strains were found to be associated with a specific location inside the
hospital, and identical strains were isolated from different buildings
of the hospital and outdoors. Isolation of the same strain both from
patients and from the environment of the same hospital is highly
suggestive of a nosocomial infection. The characteristics of the
environmental fungal population explains the two main results obtained
from the typing of the clinical isolates: (i) the absence of a common
strain responsible for an invasive aspergillosis outbreak results from
the extreme diversity of the environmental population of A. fumigatus in contact with the patients, and (ii) patients
hospitalized in different wards of the same hospital can be infected
with the same strain since every patient might inhale the same spore
population.
0095-1137/98/$04.00+0
Copyright © 1998, American Society for Microbiology. All rights reserved.
Molecular Typing of Environmental and Patient
Isolates of Aspergillus fumigatus from Various
Hospital Settings
*
Corresponding author. Mailing address: Laboratoire des
Aspergillus, Institut Pasteur, 25, rue du Dr Roux, 75724 Paris, France. Phone: 33-01-45-68-82-25. Fax: 33-01-40-61-34-19. E-mail: jplatge{at}pasteur.fr.
Journal of Clinical Microbiology, June 1998, p. 1494-1500, Vol. 36, No. 6
0095-1137/98/$04.00+0
Copyright © 1998, American Society for Microbiology. All rights reserved.
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