Cross-border outbreak of extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis linked to a university in Romania.

ABSTRACT: Extensively drug-resistant (XDR) tuberculosis (TB) poses a threat to public health due to its complicated, expensive and often unsuccessful treatment. A cluster of three XDR TB cases was detected among foreign medical students of a Romanian university. The contact investigations included tuberculin skin testing or interferon gamma release assay, chest X-ray, sputum smear microscopy, culture, drug susceptibility testing, genotyping and whole-genome sequencing (WGS), and were addressed to students, personnel of the university, family members or other close contacts of the cases. These investigations increased the total number of cases to seven. All confirmed cases shared a very similar WGS profile. Two more cases were epidemiologically linked, but no laboratory confirmation exists. Despite a

SUBMITTER: Popovici O 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9184956 | biostudies-literature | 2018 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature