title: Cholera between 1991 and 1997 in Mexico was associated with infection by classical, El Tor, and El Tor variants of Vibrio cholerae.
abstract: Vibrio cholerae O1 biotype El Tor (ET), the cause of the current 7th pandemic, has recently been replaced in Asia and Africa by an altered ET biotype possessing cholera toxin (CTX) of the classical (CL) biotype that originally caused the first six pandemics before becoming extinct in the 1980s. Until recently, the ET prototype was the biotype circulating in Peru; a detailed understanding of the evolutionary trend of V. cholerae causing endemic cholera in Latin America is lacking. The present retrospective microbiological, molecular, and phylogenetic study of V. cholerae isolates recovered in Mexico (n = 91; 1983 to 1997) shows the existence of the pre-1991 CL biotype and the ET and CL biotypes together with the altered ET biotype in both epidemic and endemic cholera between 1991 and 1997. According to sero- and biotyping data, the altered ET, which has shown predominance in Mexico since 1991, emerged locally from ET and CL progenitors that were found coexisting until 1997. In Latin America, ET and CL variants shared a variable number of phenotypic markers, while the altered ET strains had genes encoding the CL CTX (CTX(CL)) prophage, ctxB(CL) and rstR(CL), in addition to resident rstR(ET), as the underlying regional signature. The distinct regional fingerprints for ET in Mexico and Peru and their divergence from ET in Asia and Africa, as confirmed by subclustering patterns in a pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (NotI)-based dendrogram, suggest that the Mexico epidemic in 1991 may have been a local event and not an extension of the epidemics occurring in Asia and South America. Finally, the CL biotype reservoir in Mexico is unprecedented and must have contributed to the changing epidemiology of global cholera in ways that need to be understood.
authors.affiliation: International Center for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (ICDDR,B), Mohakhali, Dhaka, Bangladesh.
authors.forename: Munirul
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Alam
authors.forename: Suraia
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Nusrin
authors.forename: Atiqul
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Islam
authors.forename: Nurul A
authors.initials: NA
authors.lastname: Bhuiyan
authors.forename: Niaz
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Rahim
authors.forename: Gabriela
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Delgado
authors.forename: Rosario
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Morales
authors.forename: Jose Luis
authors.initials: JL
authors.lastname: Mendez
authors.forename: Armando
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Navarro
authors.forename: Ana I
authors.initials: AI
authors.lastname: Gil
authors.forename: Haruo
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Watanabe
authors.forename: Masatomo
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Morita
authors.forename: G Balakrish
authors.initials: GB
authors.lastname: Nair
authors.forename: Alejandro
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Cravioto
mesh_terms: D015373:Bacterial Typing Techniques; D002771:Cholera / Q000453:epidemiology* / Q000382:microbiology*; D002772:Cholera Toxin / Q000235:genetics; D016000:Cluster Analysis; D016172:DNA Fingerprinting; D004269:DNA, Bacterial / Q000235:genetics; D016521:Electrophoresis, Gel, Pulsed-Field; D005838:Genotype; D006801:Humans; D008800:Mexico / Q000453:epidemiology; D017720:Molecular Epidemiology; D039002:Prophages / Q000235:genetics; D012189:Retrospective Studies; D012703:Serotyping; D041241:Vibrio cholerae O1 / Q000145:classification* / Q000235:genetics / Q000302:isolation & purification* / Q000378:metabolism
chemical_list: D004269:DNA, Bacterial; D002772:Cholera Toxin