Rapid risk assessment: Increase in OXA -244 -producing Escherichia coli in the European Union/European Economic Area and the UK since 2013

Following an urgent inquiry in ECDC’s EPIS AMR-HAI regarding an increasing number of cases of OXA-244-producing Escherichia coli and identification of a cluster of E. coli sequence type (ST) 38 in Germany, national public health reference laboratories in European Union/European Economic Area countries were invited to submit whole genome sequencing (WGS) data to ECDC for a European-level analysis. The pooled European data showed that 33 cases of OXA-244-producing E. coli were detected between 2013 and 2015, followed by 31 cases in 2016, 21 cases in 2017, 83 cases in 2018 and 116 cases in 2019. Increased use of WGS may have enabled more discriminatory identification of cases from sample collections and contributed to the observed increase in cases. The WGS data identified one main, geographically dispersed cluster of E. coli ST38 with chromosomally encoded blaOXA244 present in all countries that had submitted data (Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and the United Kingdom). Most of the cases in this cluster were detected in 2018 and 2019.

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