Broth microdilution protocol for determining antimicrobial susceptibility of Legionella pneumophila to clinically relevant antimicrobials.

Currently there is no detailed, internationally agreed protocol defined to evaluate antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST) for Legionella pneumophila (required to establish epidemiological cut-off value or "ECOFF" boundaries); therefore, antimicrobial resistance in these isolates cannot be defined. AST methods utilising media containing activated charcoal as an ingredient, to enable Legionella growth, are unreliable as noted in an internationally authored opinion paper and a new gold standard is required. Here we define a detailed protocol for broth microdilution (BMD) using defined cell culture collection-deposited control reference strains (Philadelphia-1 and Knoxville-1) as well as two accessible reference strains with moderately (lpeAB-carrying) and markedly (23S rRNA mutation-carrying) elevated azithromycin minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC).

A patient with respiratory toxigenic diphtheria in Greece after more than 30 years.

The introduction of treatment and systematic vaccination has significantly reduced diphtheria mortality; however, toxigenic strains continue to circulate worldwide. The emergence of an indigenous diphtheria case with fatal outcome in Greece, after 30 years, raised challenges for laboratory confirmation, clinical and public health management. Toxigenic Corynebacterium diphtheriae was isolated from an incompletely vaccinated 8-year-old boy with underlying conditions.

Spatiotemporal Distribution and Genetic Characterization of Measles Strains Circulating in Greece during the 2017-2018 Outbreak.

Between May 2017 and November 2018, Greece has experienced a severe measles outbreak with a total of 3258 cases reported, after reaching its goal of eliminating measles since 2014-2015. In this study, we aimed to investigate the origin and the dispersal patterns of the measles strains that circulated in Greece during this outbreak and to identify possible transmission patterns of measles virus (MeV) in the country. Of the 832 measles suspect cases referred to the National Measles and Rubella Reference Laboratory for MeV RNA detection, 131 randomly selected positive samples, representative of the temporal and spatial distribution of the laboratory-confirmed measles cases in Greece, were processed for genotypic identification by an RT-PCR amplification of a 598 bp fragment containing the 450 bp hypervariable region of the measles virus N gene.

High prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 infection in repatriation flights to Greece from three European countries.

Passengers on repatriation flights to Greece from the UK, Spain and Turkey were screened with oropharyngeal swabs on arrival for SARS-CoV-2 infection. Despite almost all passengers being asymptomatic, many tested positive (3.6% from UK, 6.

Epidemiology of invasive meningococcal disease in Greece, 2006-2016.

The present study describes the epidemiology of invasive meningococcal disease (IMD) in Greece for the period 2006-2016. Combined data from notified and laboratory-confirmed IMD cases were obtained from the two involved National Centres (Epidemiology and Reference Laboratory). Laboratory identification and typing was carried out by both conventional (culture) and molecular methods (PCR, MLST, PorA, and FetA typing).