In the course of an annual 3-month bloodstream infections BSI survey conducted during a four-year period in 31 healthcare institutions located in three noncontiguous French regions, we report 18 ST Staphylococcus aureus BSI.
ST BSI incidence showed a seven-fold increase during the study period 0. The acquisition of the phage likely plays a role in the increasing ability of the lysogenic ST isolates to colonize human.
The mode of acquisition of the non pig-borne ST isolates by our 18 patients remains unclear. This raises the question of possible foodborne human infections.
We suggest the need for active surveillance to study and control the spread of this human-adapted subclone increasingly isolated in the hospital setting. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. Primarily described in Europe, ST methicillin-resistant S.
