Bordetella parapertussis isolate collected from bacteriemia. Bordetella parapertussis and bacteriemia

Whooping cough is a highly contagious respiratory disease transmitted from human to human via aerosolized respiratory droplets, whose primary agent is a gram-negative bacterium, Bordetella pertussis. The closely related agent B. parapertussis is responsible for a minority of cases and rarely causes severe disease. We report here the case of a 3-years old child with B. parapertussis bacteremia. We describe the clinical expression of this unusual systemic disease, review the literature, and characterize the genomic sequence of the isolate in comparison to B. parapertussis isolates from respiratory infections