An outbreak of Coxsackievirus A6 infection in adults of a collective unit, China, 2019

Abstract

Background: Outbreaks/epidemic caused by Coxsackievirus A6 have been reported continuously since 2008. However, outbreaks caused by Coxsackievirus A6 infection in adults of a collective unit have not been reported.Methods: The nasopharyngeal swab specimens were collected to extract the total nucleic acid (DNA/RNA). The pathogen was determined using nucleic acid detection kits for 22 respiratory pathogens. The VP1 gene of this pathogen was amplified and sequenced. Sequence alignment and analysis were performed using Bioedit. The gene phylogenetic tree was constructed with MEGA software.Results: The factory emerged patients in succession from the February 14 and reached the peak on the 18th. The main symptoms were rash, ocular conjunctival hemorrhage, fever and sore throat. A total of 19 workers had symptoms in this factory up to March 31, 2019, giving an attack rate of 8.26%. The laboratory results showed that Coxsackievirus A6 was the main pathogen causing this outbreak. The risk of taking a bath in the bathroom was 7.37 times higher than that of not taking a bath (95% CI: 1.67-32.79).Conclusions: This manuscript further enriched the infection-related information of CVA6, which was helpful to better identify and deal with the epidemic in the future.