Pseudo-outbreak of Mycobacterium gordonae: usefulness of randomly amplified polymorphic DNA analysis to assess the clonality of the isolates.

Mycobacterium gordonae was detected in 18 of 21 clinical samples processed during the same day from patients with clinical suspicion of tuberculosis. Randomly amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD) analysis revealed that all the isolates generated an identical pattern with each of the five primers used, and that these patterns were different from those of epidemiologically non-related isolates of M. gordonae. M. gordonae was not detected in the distilled water used for the procedures, and following replacement of the commercial products and sterilisation of home-made reagents, no more isolates belonging to the same clone of M. gordonae were detected.