As part of the SENTRY Antimicrobial Surveillance Program, an imipenem-resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa strain (81-11963A) was isolated from the blood culture of a female neonate institutionalized at the local children's hospital in Warsaw, Poland. Cloning of an imipenem resistance determinant revealed it to be a VIM-2 metallo-β-lactamase, but sequence analysis of DNA adjacent to bla VIM-2 revealed it to have a unique gene context. Downstream of the bla VIM-2 gene resides an aacA4 gene encoding

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... he AAC(6′)-Ib aminoglycoside acetyltransferase. The integron containing bla VIM-2 shows high similarity to that reported from In58 in France but was novel in that it possessed a gene cassette with a 59 truncated base element only 19 base pairs (bp) long, consisting of a conserved core site and an inverse core site separated by only 5 bp. This appears to be the first report of a metallo-β-lactamase gene arising from a pathogenic strain in Eastern Europe.