[Infection outbreak due to resistant Enterococcus faecium to glycopeptides in a Hospital of Rosario, Argentina].

Enterococci causes serious illness in immunocompromised patients and in severely ill, hospitalized patients. They are commonly isolated from the human gastrointestinal tract, and resistance to vancomycin has increased in frequency during the past few years. We report three cases of nosocomial vancomycin resistant Entrococcus faecium (VRE) infections from September to December of 2000. A 54-year-old man presented post surgical wound infection due to VRE after 2 months of hospitalization. The second is a 65-year-old neutropenic patient with a medical history of acute myeloid leukemia and esophageal carcinoma. In this case, central venous catheter was colonized with EVR. The third, a 65-year-old woman who received therapy with ceftriaxone, ciprofloxacin and clindamicin had a urinary tract infection due to EVR. The three isolates were resistant to vancomycin (MIC value > 256 micrograms/ml). The DNA amplification pattern obtained by OD-PCR were similar in the three cases.