SUMMARY Vibrio parahaemolyticus is recognized as a cause of food-borne gastroenteritis, particularly in the Far East, where raw seafood consumption is high. An unusual increase in admissions of V. parahaemolyticus cases was observed at the Infectious Diseases Hospital in Calcutta, a city in the northeastern part of India, beginning February 1996. Analysis of the strains revealed that a unique serotype, O3:K6, not previously isolated during the surveillance in Calcutta accounted for 50 to 80% of the infections in the following months. After this report, O3:K6 isolates identical to those isolated in Calcutta were reported from food-borne outbreaks and from sporadic cases in Bangladesh, Chile, France, Japan, Korea, Laos, Mozambique, Peru, Russia, Spain, Taiwan, Thailand, and the United States. Other serotypes, such as O4:K68, O1:K25, and O1:KUT (untypeable), that had molecular characteristics identical to that of the O3:K6 serotype were subsequently documented. These serotypes appeared to have diverged from the O3:K6 serotype by alteration of the O:K antigens and were defined as “serovariants” of the O3:K6 isolate. O3:K6 and its serovariants have now spread into Asia, America, Africa, and Europe. This review traces the genesis, virulence features, molecular characteristics, serotype variants, environmental occurrence, and global spread of this unique clone of V. parahaemolyticus.

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Summary A large outbreak of acute watery diarrhoea involving all age groups of mongoloid tribal aborigines occurred during October–November, 2002 in the Nancowry group of Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Indian Ocean. Twenty‐one of the 67 stool samples from 67 patients were positive for toxigenic Vibrio cholerae O1, serotype Ogawa biotype El Tor, which showed striking similarity in its antibiogram with some of the strains of V. cholerae O1 Serotype Ogawa biotype El Tor isolated in Kolkata. The Nancowry and Kolkata isolates were compared with molecular tools involving random amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD) fingerprinting, ribotyping and pulsed‐field gel electrophoresis (PFGE). RAPD fingerprinting and ribotyping techniques revealed that all the V. cholerae strains associated with the outbreak in these islands were clonal in nature and identical to a population of isolates obtained from Kolkata since 1993. PFGE could discriminate within these Kolkata isolates further and established that a particular subtype of this population reached the remote Nancowry islands and was responsible for the outbreak.

Vibrio cholerae isolates from environmental and clinical origins in the Bengal region in which epidemics of cholera break out periodically were analyzed with particular emphasis on the molecular epidemiological features. The presence of the virulence genes (ctxA, tcpA and toxR) in the isolates was analyzed by the PCR (polymerase chain reaction) method. PFGE (pulsed-field gel electrophoresis) was performed to determine the clonal relationships between the clinical and environmental strains. Antibiograms and 0 serovars of the isolates were also examined. 01 and 0139 strains from both clinical and environmental sources were all positive for the three virulence genes while non-01/non-0139 strains from both sources were all negative for ctxA and tcpA but positive for toxR. PFGE patterns of recent isolates of 01 and 0139 were similar in each serovar regardless of origin, suggesting a clonal relationship between the clinical and environmental strains, although comparison with past isolates or isolates from different geographical area showed some differences.