2017 Volume 66 Issue 6 Pages 703-708
We report a case of sepsis due to Capnocytophaga canis, which was reported to be a novel species of the Capnocytophaga genus in 2016. A 67-year-old female with a medical history of splenectomy was admitted to our hospital with fever and general malaise. Her fever lasted three days from the day after a cat bit her both hands, and her laboratory data and physical examination on admission showed sepsis and disseminated intravascular coagulation (DIC). Only anaerobic bottles of blood culture were positive 24 h after the start of culture, and various sizes of Gram-negative bacilli having sharp ends were observed in the smear of anaerobic blood culture fluid. The strain grew over 4 days after starting the cultivation with subcultures, and it was identified as Capnocytophaga canimorsus using a biochemical identification kit (identification probability, 99%).On the other hand, in nucleotide sequence analysis, the 16S rRNA and gyrB gene sequences of the present strain showed relatively low identities (96.9% and 75.5%, respectively) to the C. canimorsus type strain (ATCC 35979). In contrast, the sequences of 16S rRNA and the gyrB gene showed extremely high identities of 99.8% and 99.5% between the present strain and the C. canis type strain (LMG 29146), respectively. C. canis is considered to be a low-pathogenicity bacterium isolated from the oral cavity of dogs in previous reports, but our case showed severe sepsis due to C. canis following a cat bite.
