| Literature DB >> 27353752 |
Xavier Didelot1, Janina Dordel2, Lilith K Whittles3, Caitlin Collins3, Nicole Bilek4, Cynthia J Bishop5, Peter J White6, David M Aanensen7, Julian Parkhill8, Stephen D Bentley8, Brian G Spratt3, Simon R Harris9.
Abstract
UNLABELLED: Gonorrhea is a sexually transmitted disease causing growing concern, with a substantial increase in reported incidence over the past few years in the United Kingdom and rising levels of resistance to a wide range of antibiotics. Understanding its epidemiology is therefore of major biomedical importance, not only on a population scale but also at the level of direct transmission. However, the molecular typing techniques traditionally used for gonorrhea infections do not provide sufficient resolution to investigate such fine-scale patterns. Here we sequenced the genomes of 237 isolates from two local collections of isolates from Sheffield and London, each of which was resolved into a single type using traditional methods. The two data sets were selected to have different epidemiological properties: the Sheffield data were collected over 6 years from a predominantly heterosexual population, whereas the London data were gathered within half a year and strongly associated with men who have sex with men. Based on contact tracing information between individuals in Sheffield, we found that transmission is associated with a median time to most recent common ancestor of 3.4 months, with an upper bound of 8 months, which we used as a criterion to identify likely transmission links in both data sets. In London, we found that transmission happened predominantly between individuals of similar age, sexual orientation, and location and also with the same HIV serostatus, which may reflect serosorting and associated risk behaviors. Comparison of the two data sets suggests that the London epidemic involved about ten times more cases than the Sheffield outbreak. IMPORTANCE: The recent increases in gonorrhea incidence and antibiotic resistance are cause for public health concern. Successful intervention requires a better understanding of transmission patterns, which is not uncovered by traditional molecular epidemiology techniques. Here we studied two outbreaks that took place in Sheffield and London, United Kingdom. We show that whole-genome sequencing provides the resolution to investigate direct gonorrhea transmission between infected individuals. Combining genome sequencing with rich epidemiological information about infected individuals reveals the importance of several transmission routes and risk factors, which can be used to design better control measures.Entities:
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Year: 2016 PMID: 27353752 PMCID: PMC4937209 DOI: 10.1128/mBio.00525-16
Source DB: PubMed Journal: mBio Impact factor: 7.867
FIG 1 Timed phylogeny for the Sheffield data set reconstructed using BEAST. Known sexual contacts are indicated by uniquely colored circles and squares. (Inset) Intervals for the time to the last common ancestor (TMRCA) of each pair within a group of known sexual contacts.
FIG 2 Transmission tree for the Sheffield data set reconstructed using Outbreaker. Cases are indicated by black dots, except for known sexual contacts, who are indicated using the same markers as in Fig. 1. Each case is aligned on the x axis with its reporting date, and the y axis is arbitrary. Black links between cases indicate inferred direct transmission, and gray links indicate indirect transmission through at least one unsampled case.
FIG 3 Timed phylogeny for the London data set reconstructed using BEAST. Each isolate is annotated on the right-hand side as follows. First column: black for MSM, blue for heterosexual men, and red for heterosexual women. Second column: black for HIV negative and red for HIV positive. Third column: number of reported United Kingdom partners in the last 3 months, with black for zero, gray for one, dark blue for two to five, and light blue for six or more.
FIG 4 Density histograms of the time to the most recent common ancestor for all pairs of cases sampled within 3 months of each other. The Sheffield data are shown in red when a sexual contact was reported and in green otherwise, whereas the London data are shown in blue.