Typhoid Fever

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INTRODUCTION
This assignment is related to the common worldwide bacterial disease typhoid fever in children under the age of 16 in the two squatter settlements of Karachi, Pakistan (Sultanabad & Hijrat colony).This research was conducted by Fahad Javaid Siddiqui, Fauziah Rabbani, Rumina Hasan, Syed Qamaruddin Nizami, Zulfiqar Ahmed Bhutta, published in the “Journal of Infectious Disease, (2006), 10:215–222”.
Typhoid
Typhoid also called typhoid fever is the most common worldwide bacterial disease transmitted by the intake of contaminated food and water with feaces of infected person which contain the bacterium ‘Salmonella enterica serovar typhi’(Crump et al.,2003).
Bacteriology
Salmonella typhi is rod shaped gram negative bacteria found only …show more content…

DISCUSSION
Typhoid fever is endemic in Southeast Asia including Pakistan. To our knowledge, this study is the first kind of study conducted on community level to detect typhoid fever in Karachi. Based on person years of observation, the overall incidence of clinical typhoid in this study was 11.69/1000, out of which the sero-positive typhoid 7/1000 and culture-positive typhoid 1.68/1000 which is close to the culture-positivity rate of 1.98/1000 in Vietnam (Lin et al., 2000).
This study shows 50% of febrile episodes in children, whereas population-based experience of typhoid fever in Vietnam, Delhi and Egypt is different and blood culture positivity rates among febrile cases were only 8.5%, 5% and 4.2% respectively.
The study indicates culture-positive typhoid fever in the 5–10 years age group. However a high incidence among serologically positive cases found in the >10–15 year age group.
No culture-positive typhoid fever was detected in very young children, as the children were not brought to clinics for screening (Siddiqui et al., 2006).
Moreover, seasonality patterns is different in Karachi and Vietnam. The …show more content…

The same was observed in Indonesia (Lin et al., 2000).

CONCLUSION
Typhoid fever is endemic in this community with the highest incidence occurring in children (both girls and boys) of age 5–10 years, especially after rainfall months. There is a need of public health awareness programs to maintain hygienic conditions and mass scale vaccination is required. Although this study does not give a full picture but gives us an outline to work further with facility-based surveillance

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