First Description of a Yersinia pseudotuberculosis Clonal Outbreak in France, Confirmed Using a New Core Genome Multilocus Sequence Typing Method

Yersinia pseudotuberculosis is an enteric pathogen causing mild enteritis that can lead to mesenteric adenitis in children and septicemia in elderly patients. Most cases are sporadic, but outbreaks have already been described in different countries. We report for the first time a Y. pseudotuberculosis clonal outbreak in France, that occurred in 2020. An epidemiological investigation based on food queries pointed toward the consumption of tomatoes as the suspected source of infection. The Yersinia National Reference Laboratory (YNRL) developed a new cgMLST scheme with 1,921 genes specific to Y. pseudotuberculosis that identified the clustering of isolates associated with the outbreak and allowed to perform molecular typing in real time. In addition, this method allowed to retrospectively identify isolates belonging to this cluster from earlier in 2020. This method, which does not require specific bioinformatic skills, is now used systematically at the YNRL and proves to display an excellent discriminatory power and is available to the scientific community. IMPORTANCE We describe in here a novel core-genome MLST method that allowed to identify in real time, and for the first time in France, a Y. pseudotuberculosis clonal outbreak that took place during the summer 2020 in Corsica. Our method allows to support epidemiological and microbiological investigations to establish a link between patients infected with closely associated Y. pseudotuberculosis isolates, and to identify the potential source of infection. In addition, we made this method available for the scientific community.