Patent ID: 8046172

Claim:
A method of tracking the spread of infectious bacteria, comprising: obtaining a plurality of bacterium samples from a plurality of patients or objects at a plurality of different physical locations; determining the DNA sequence of a first region of deoxyribonucleic acid from each bacterium sample, wherein said first region has a clock speed that is suitable for tracking the spread of infectious bacteria; storing in a database for each of the plurality of bacterium samples: a) the nucleotide sequence data from the first sequenced region of each bacterium sample, and b) the physical location of the patient or object from which each bacterium sample was obtained; comparing the nucleotide sequence data stored in the database of at least two of the plurality of samples on both a base pair level and a repeat motif level; determining a measure of phylogenetic relatedness between the compared samples based upon differences between the compared nucleotide sequence data; identifying patients infected or objects contaminated with phylogenetically related bacteria based on the phylogenetic relatedness determination; tracking the spread over time of the bacteria based on: a) the identified patients or contaminated objects, and b) the physical locations of the identified patients or objects stored in the database; and providing a warning based on the tracking of the spread of the bacteria wherein the warning allows the recipient of the warning to control the further spread of the bacteria.