Ann Lab Med.  2013 Jul;33(4):283-287. 10.3343/alm.2013.33.4.283.

The First Korean Case of Sphingobacterium spiritivorum Bacteremia in a Patient with Acute Myeloid Leukemia

• Koh YR
• Kim SY
• Chang CL
• Shin HJ
• Kim KH
• Yi J

• KMID: 1707237
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.3343/alm.2013.33.4.283

Abstract

Sphingobacterium spiritivorum has been rarely isolated from clinical specimens of immunocompromised patients, and there have been no case reports of S. spiritivorum infection in Korea to our knowledge. We report a case of S. spiritivorum bacteremia in a 68-yr-old woman, who was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia and subsequently received chemotherapy. One day after chemotherapy ended, her body temperature increased to 38.3degrees C. A gram-negative bacillus was isolated in aerobic blood cultures and identified as S. spiritivorum by an automated biochemical system. A 16S rRNA sequencing analysis confirmed that the isolate was S. spiritivorum. The patient received antibiotic therapy for 11 days but died of septic shock. This is the first reported case of human S. spiritivorum infection in Korea. Although human infection is rare, S. spiritivorum can be a fatal opportunistic pathogen in immunocompromised patients.

Keyword

Sphingobacterium spiritivorum; Bacteremia; Immunocompromised patient; 16S rRNA sequencing

MeSH Terms

Aged
Anti-Bacterial Agents/therapeutic use
Bacteremia/*complications/drug therapy/*microbiology
Bone Marrow Cells/pathology
Fatal Outcome
Female
Humans
Immunocompromised Host
Leukemia, Myeloid, Acute/*complications
Phylogeny
RNA, Ribosomal, 16S/genetics
Sequence Analysis, DNA
Shock, Septic/etiology/microbiology
Sphingobacterium/classification/genetics/isolation & purification/*physiology
Anti-Bacterial Agents
RNA, Ribosomal, 16S

Figure

• 

  Fig. 1 (A) Gram-negative bacilli from smear preparations of the positive blood cultures (Gram stain, ×1,000). (B) Yellow-colored colonies of Sphingobacterium spiritivorum on a blood agar plate.

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  Fig. 2 Phylogenetic relationships of the isolate from the present patient and related Sphingobacterium species, constructed by the neighbor-joining method by using the Microseq 500 bp 16S rRNA sequences. All names and accession numbers are given as cited in the GenBank database. The tree was drawn with branch length as the evolutionary distances. The scale bar length of 0.01 indicates 1% sequence distance.

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