The enteric pathogen Vibrio parahaemolyticus is known to cause epidemic and pandemic diarrhea. In industrialized countries, this pathogen causes sporadic or outbreaks of diarrheal illness associated with consumption of raw or improperly cooked seafood. This report describes a foodborne outbreak of gastroenteritis caused by V. parahaemolyticus in June 2011 following consumption of food served in a funeral ceremony at Habra, North 24 Parganas, West Bengal, India. About 650 people attended the

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... tion, of which 44 people had acute watery diarrhea with other clinical symptoms and 35 of them were admitted to the District Hospital for the rehydration treatment. All the three tested stool specimens collected from the hospitalized cases were culturally positive for V. parahaemolyticus, of which two strains belonged to the serovar O4:K8 and one was identified as O3:K6. In the group-specific PCR (GS-PCR) that identifies the pandemic strains of V. parahaemolyticus, only the O3:K6 serovar was positive. All the V. parahaemolyticus strains harbored the potential virulence gene (tdh) that encodes a thermostable-direct hemolysin and resistant to ampicillin but susceptible to other antimicrobials. In the pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE), the NotI restriction pattern of the O3:K6 strain was similar to that of a recent clinical strain from Kolkata but diverged from others isolated during the previous years. On the other hand, the non-pandemic O4:K8 strains were closely related but different from a recent strain from Kolkata. (227)