Molecular epidemiology of tuberculosis in Turkey.

Our objective was to determine the extent of fingerprint pattern diversity of Mycobacterium tuberculosis isolates from Turkey. Of the 320 patient isolates, 81 (25.3%) carried </= 5 copies of IS6110. The combination of two typing procedures on isolates from 317 patients identified 157 strains as unique and clustered 160 isolates in 59 clusters. In spite of the fact that the patients originated from a large geographic area and represented only a small fraction (1.5%) of the patients in the country, 50.5% of the isolates were clustered.