Background
Respiratory viral infections are a significant problem in patients with hematologic malignancies. We report a cluster of HPIV 3 infections in our myeloma patients, and describe the utility of next generation sequencing (NGS) to identify transmission linkages which can assist in infection prevention.
Objectives
To evaluate the utility of NGS to track respiratory viral infection outbreaks and delineate between community acquired and nosocomial infections in our cancer units.
Study Design
Retrospective chart review conducted at a single site. All patients diagnosed with multiple myeloma who developed symptoms suggestive of upper respiratory tract infection (URTI) or lower respiratory tract infection (LRTI) along with a respiratory viral panel (RVP) test positive for HPIV 3 between April 1, 2016, to June 30, 2016, were included. Sequencing was performed on the Illumina MiSeq™. To gain understanding regarding community strains of HPIV 3 during the same season, we also performed NGS on HPIV3 strains isolated from pediatric cases.
Results
We saw a cluster of 13 cases of HPIV3 infections in the myeloma unit. Using standard epidemiologic criteria, 3 cases were considered community acquired, 7 cases developed infection during treatment in the cancer infusion center, while an additional 3 developed infections during hospital stay. Seven patients required hospitalization for a median duration of 20 days. NGS enabled sensitive discrimination of the relatedness of the isolates obtained during the outbreak and provided evidence for source of transmission. Two hospital onset infections could be tracked to an index case; the genome sequences of HPIV 3 strains from these 3 patients only differed by a single nucleotide.
Conclusions
NGS offers a significantly higher discriminatory value as an epidemiologic tool, and can be used to gather real-time information and identification of transmission linkages to assist in infection prevention in immunocompromised patients.
We report here the complete genome sequence of a WU polyomavirus (WUPyV) isolate, also known as human polyomavirus 4, collected in 2016 from a patient in Arkansas with an acute respiratory infection. Isolate hPyV4/USA/AR001/2016 has a double-stranded DNA genome of 5,229 bp in length.
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