H58 is displacing other typhoid strains, say scientists.
By Raif Karerat
WASHINGTON, DC: An antibiotic-resistant strain of typhoid fever has proliferated across the globe, bolstered by a single “superbug” family of the bacteria called H58, according to a new international study.
The research, involving some 74 scientists in almost two dozen countries, is one of the most comprehensive sets of genetic data on a human infectious agent and paints a worrying scene of an “ever-increasing public health threat”, per Reuters.
“H58 is displacing other typhoid strains, completely transforming the genetic architecture of the disease and creating a previously [underappreciated] and on-going epidemic,” the researchers said in a statement about their findings.
The research team found that H58 emerged in South Asia 25 to 30 years ago and spread to Southeast Asia, Western Asia, East and South Africa, and Fiji. They also found evidence of a recent and unreported wave of H58 in several countries throughout Africa, which may be indicative of an ongoing epidemic.
Resistance “has been coming and going since the 1970s”, she said, but in the H58 strain, the resistance genes are becoming a stable part of the genome “which means multiple antibiotic resistant typhoid is here to stay”.
In order to arrive at their conclusions, the team, whose work was published in the journal Nature Genetics on Monday, sequenced the genomes of 1,832 samples of Salmonella Typhi bacteria that were collected from 63 countries between 1992 and 2013, reported Reuters.
The bacterium that catalyzes typhoid fever may be spread through poor hygiene habits and public sanitation conditions, and sometimes also by flying insects feeding on feces.
Eating or drinking contaminated matter is one of the most common forms of typhoid transmission, and was the crux of the infamous historical figure Typhoid Mary, a cook who asymptomatically caused numerous outbreaks across the United States’ Eastern Seaboard in the early 1900s.