Rising Drug Resistant Typhoid Cases Cause A Concern

Drug Resistant Typhoid: As per a study conducted recently, it has been found that drug resistant typhoid cases are on the rise from South Asia.

Due to this, vert few antibiotics are currently working against typhoid. And so, researchers are asking for a global response to handle the above menace.

After a series of experiments conducted, scientists have com to the conclusion that the bacteria responsible to cause typhoid fever is increasingly becoming resistant to the most common antibiotics being used to treat the disease.

It has been noticed that resistant strains have spread to a number of countries majorly caused by the bacterium Salmonella Typhi (S.Typhi).

Typhoid is a disease that affects the masses. In terms of numbers, it affects between 11-20 million people each year and leads to almost 2 lakh deaths, as per WHO.

The above study was published in the journal The Lancet Microbe which shows how the resistant strains have emerged from South Asia where the cases are reported to be highest. Now, this has spread almost 200 times since 1990.

Jason Andrews, who’s the lead author and an expert in the infectious disease from from Stanford University said “The repeated acquisition of antimicrobial resistance among S.Typhi and spread across borders is concerning. We have very few antibiotics left that are effective against typhoid.” he said.

s per the international team of researchers, the above findings simply stress the need to treat drug resistant typhoid as a global issue.

The researchers had to perform genome sequencing to isolate the drug resistant typhoid strains. T

hey conducted genome sequencing on 3,489 S.Typhid strains taken from blood samples between the years 2014 and 2019.

These strains were specific from countries like Pakistan, Nepal, India, and Bangladesh.

In order to do comparison, they further analyzed other 4,169 S.Typhi samples from 70 countries between the years 1905 and 2018.

As per researchers, these are the largest examination of the S. Typhi bacterium.

After collecting the above samples, they studied the process of genetic analysis techniques and found that all 7,658 strains were resistant to all traditional antibiotics like sulfamethoxazole or trimethoprim, chloramphenicol, and ampicillin.

They further analyzed the data to show that resistant S. Typhi strains might have spread in countries since 1990.

Typhoid is a highly contagious water borne disease which usually spread through contaminated food, water, person to person contact specific in areas with poor sanitation facilities.

 

Multidrug-Resistant Typhoid Cases Seen In Pakistan

According to the researchers, the cases of multidrug-resistant typhoid have been found in Pakistan, whereas typhoid resistant cases against antibiotic azithromycin has been widely found in countries like India, Nepal, and Bangladesh.

This is what Andrews, one of the researchers said, “If MDR strains acquire azithromycin resistance, we will have no effective oral antibiotics left for treating typhoid,” he said.

In their testing, researchers also tried to compare different strains showing resistance to antibiotics like quinolones and macrolides that are considered the highly crucial ones for treatment in humans.

For example, typhoid strains that are resistant to antibiotic quinolones have risen many folds since 1990.

Such strains accounted for over 85% of S.Typhi cases in Bangladesh by the early 2000s. The same is predicted to rise up to 95% in Nepal, Pakistan and India by 2010.

It all happened due to the mutations as it caused resistance to azithromycin. The above has emerged up to 7 times in the past 20 years. And these strains have also found to be resistant to 3rd generation antibiotics cephalosporin.

 

Also Read: WHO Declares An End to Latest Ebola Outbreak In African Country

 

 

Source: Gavi.org

 

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