Introduction: Between January and August 2003 glycopeptide-resistant Enterococcus faecalis was isolated from eight patients admitted to the intensive care unit (ICU).
Methods: Antibiotic susceptibility testing was performed by disk diffusion and the Etest, clonal relatedness of the isolates was studied by pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE), and the presence of vanA was investigated by PCR.
Results and conclusions: All the isolates were vanA-positive and had an identical PFGE pattern, showing that an outbreak had occurred in our ICU.