Epidemiology and Characteristics of spp. Infections in Southeast Asia.

spp. is a ubiquitous pathogenic bacterium that has been identified as the causal agent for a variety of conditions such as meningitis, pneumonia, necrotizing fasciitis, endophthalmitis, and sepsis and is emerging as a global threat including in Southeast Asia. infections tend to be associated with high mortality rates (18.2-41%) and are mostly observed in neonates and immunocompromised patients. Difficulties in precisely identifying at the species level by traditional methods have hampered our understanding of this genus in human infections. In Southeast Asian countries, hospital outbreaks have usually been ascribed to , whereas in Singapore, was reported as the main spp. associated with hospital settings. Misidentification of spp. could, however, underestimate the number of cases attributed to the bacterium, as precise identification requires tools such as MALDI-TOF MS, and particularly whole-genome sequencing, which are not available in most hospital laboratories. spp. has an unusual antibiotic resistance pattern for a Gram-negative bacterium with a limited number of horizontal gene transfers, which suggests an intrinsic origin for its multidrug resistance. Efforts to prevent and further understand spp. infections and limit its spread must rise to this new challenge.