Verification of a PCR-based typing method for Acinetobacter baumannii in a pseudo-outbreak investigation.

Acinetobacter spp. isolates were increasingly obtained from clinical specimens and sterility samples, and a subsequent epidemiological investigation implicated an intermittently contaminated supply of commercially acquired enrichment broths. Typing was performed with DNA amplification by the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) using enterobacterial repetitive intergenic consensus sequence primers, ERIC2 and reverse ERIC1R. The reliability of this PCR-based typing method was verified by the ability of the technique to demonstrate homology and differences among isolates from an epidemiologically well-defined pseudo-outbreak.