Streptococcus agalactiae in urinary tract infections.

Streptococcus agalactiae was found to be the cause of approximately 1% of urinary tract infections in a London teaching hospital in the 2 years studied. Of the forty-eight patients with this infection, forty-three were female. In nine patients the infection followed renal transplantation while in nine others it occurred in the presence of chronic renal failure. The rest, who included seven females who developed the infection following hysterectomies, had other clinical conditions which could have predisposed to such infections. The rarity of urinary tract infection by S. agalactiae is in contrast to the high frequency with which the organism colonizes the normal urethra. Serotypes III and II were the predominant isolates in these patients with urinary tract infections; this corresponds to the distribution of the different serotypes in the genito-urinary tract of normal individuals.