The Transmission and Antibiotic Resistance Variation in a Multiple Drug Resistance Clade of Vibrio cholerae Circulating in Multiple Countries in Asia

Vibrio cholerae has caused massive outbreaks and even trans-continental epidemics. In 2008 and 2010, at least 3 remarkable cholera outbreaks occurred in Hainan, Anhui and Jiangsu provinces of China. To address the possible transmissions and the relationships to the 7(th) pandemic strains of those 3 outbreaks, we sequenced the whole genomes of the outbreak isolates and compared with the global isolates from the 7(th) pandemic. The three outbreaks in this study were caused by a cluster of V. cholerae in clade 3.B which is parallel to the clade 3.C that was transmitted from Nepal to Haiti and caused an outbreak in 2010. Pan-genome analysis provided additional evolution information on the mobile element and acquired multiple antibiotic resistance genes. We suggested that clade 3.B should be monitored because the multiple antibiotic resistant characteristics of this clade and the ‘amplifier’ function of China in the global transmission of current Cholera pandemic. We also show that dedicated whole genome sequencing analysis provided more information than the previous techniques and should be applied in the disease surveillance networks.