Metagenomics as New Tool for Diagnosis of Scrub Typhus: Two Case Reports

Abstract

Scrub typhus is a vector-borne infectious disease caused by Orientia tsutsugamushi. Accurate and timely diagnosis at the early infection stage could save the patients’ lives. Traditional technologies were limited to rapidly and successfully detecting Orientia tsutsugamushi due to poor specificity, especially in the condition of atypical symptoms. The technology of Metagenomic next-generation sequencing (mNGS) is amenable to finding the real pathogen because it holds potential as a diagnostic platform for unbiased pathogen identification and precision medicine. Herein, we reported two clinical case reports relative to the Orientia tsutsugamushi infection diagnosed by mNGS. We hope these two cases will improve clinical diagnosis.

Keywords:

• scrub typhus
• metagenomic next-generation sequencing
• Orientia tsutsugamushi

Ethics and Consent

Patient 1 and Patient 2 both consented to the publication of the case and have signed the consent form. All procedures carried out comply with the ethical standards of the Responsible Committee on Human Experimentation (institutional and national) and the principles of the Declaration of Helsinki. Informed consents were obtained from the patients for being included in this report. The authors confirm that both patients provided written informed consent for their case details and images to be published. The two case reports were approved by Guangdong Provincial People’s Hospital (KY-N-2022-003-03).

Disclosure

The authors report no conflicts of interest in this work.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Research Foundation for Advanced Talents of Guangdong Provincial People’s Hospital (KY012023289) and the Key R & D Program of Jiangsu Province (BE2020646).