Necessity of Molecular Techniques To Distinguish between Neisseria meningitidis Strains Isolated from Patients with Meningococcal Disease and from Their Healthy Contacts

Volume 36, no. 9, p. 2465–2470, 1998. Strain 88/048, isolated in Canada, was incorrectly described as an ET15 strain representative of other ET15 meningococci from that country. In fact, 88/048 is an ET4 strain (F. E. Ashton et al., J. Clin. Microbiol. 29:2489–2493, 1991) and the significance of the bands obtained on pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) distinguishing this strain from an ET15 strain isolated in the Czech Republic cannot be interpreted. We have examined by PFGE an additional four ET15 strains isolated in the Czech Republic and five ET15 strains from Canada. The strains are all very similar to strain 259/43 and to each other by PFGE after digestion with NheI or SpeI and are clearly highly related. Therefore, the conclusion that “these strains [ET15 strains from Canada and the Czech Republic] do not share a recent common ancestor and … there may be no direct epidemiological link between disease in Canada and disease in the Czech Republic” is invalid. This error does not affect the rest of the data in our article.