Salmonella enterica subspecies II infections in England and Wales – the use of multilocus sequence typing to assist serovar identification

Identifying rare Salmonella serotypes by conventional serotyping can be a problem for diagnostic or reference microbiology laboratories. We report two cases of the seldom encountered serovar Salmonella Dubrovnik, which is known as Salmonella subspecies II 41 : z : 1,5, in an elderly man and a young child. Multilocus sequence typing, a technique that is being used more frequently in our laboratory, was used to assist serovar identification as serotyping proved to be inconclusive. To our knowledge, these cases were not linked geographically and there were no known associations between them although they occurred within a very short time of each other.