In the autumn of 1983, an outbreak of recurrent abdominal cramps occurred in a nursery and primary school in the Rovigo area in Italy. None of the 10 affected children had diarrhea. An atypical Campylobacterlike organism was isolated from feces in all cases. Conventional enteropathogens were searched for but not detected. The Campylobacter-like organism was identified as Arcobacter butzleri by using sodium dodecyl sulfate-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis ofwhole-cell proteins and cellular fatty acid analysis. Its identity was confirmed by DNA-DNA hybridizations versus Arcobacter reference strains. All of the preserved outbreak strains have identical protein profiles and phenotypic characteristics and belong to serogroup 1 of the Lior serotyping scheme on the basis of slide agglutination of crude and absorbed antisera of A. butzleri reference strains versus heat-labile antigens of live bacteria. These data point to an epidemiological relationship. The successive timing of the cases suggests person-to-person transmission.

A prospective study compared fecal isolation rates of Campylobacter concisus for children with diarrhea and without diarrhea by a filter technique in which media were incubated for 4 days in a microaerobic atmosphere. No statistically significant difference in isolation rates was found (13.2% in patients with diarrhea and 9% in controls). Moreover, 35 of 37 children attending the same day care center harbored different C. concisus strains, as was demonstrated by arbitrary primer PCR DNA fingerprinting. These data suggest a lack of a pathogenic role for C. concisus in enteritis.

During an 18-month period all stools submitted to a microbiology laboratory in Belgium for culture were screened for Verocytotoxin-producing Escherichia coli (VTEC) serotype O157. In the stool samples from 3940 patients, eight (0.2%) VTEC O157 strains were isolated, seven of which were O157:H7. Additional screening for other serotypes of VTEC in 332 selected stool samples yielded four more strains (serotypes O2:K1:H6, O111:H-, O117:K1:H7 and O"C70/86":H-). The 0.3% isolation rate for all VTEC was comparable to that for Shigella spp. Eight children under 30 months and two adults suffered from uncomplicated gastroenteritis. A 5-month-old child and a 41-year-old woman presented with hemolytic uremic syndrome a few days after onset of a diarrheal episode.

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