Dissemination of a capsular and antibiotype variant of the England14-9 pneumococcal clone in the Czech Republic

ABSTRACTForty-one clinical isolates of serotype 19F Streptococcus pneumoniae resistant to chloramphenicol and/or tetracycline, isolated in the Czech Republic between 1996 and 2005, were analysed by pulsed-field gel electrophoresis and multilocus sequence typing. All but two isolates belonged to a single cluster represented by sequence type 423, a double-locus variant of clone England14-9. Interestingly, these two isolates differed from the dominant clone in capsular type as well as antibiotic susceptibility profile.