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Health officials say they have documented
the first sexually transmitted outbreak of typhoid fever in
the United States. The rare disease usually is spread through
tainted food and water.
A Cincinnati man passed typhoid to seven
other men in the city who had sex with him last summer, federal
researchers said Wednesday. It is treatable with antibiotics,
but is occasionally fatal for victims who do not seek treatment.
Typhoid is most often transmitted by swallowing
food and water contaminated with human feces, which harbors
a type of salmonella that causes the disease. But health officials
found that none of the Cincinnati men shared food or drink.
The disease likely circulated by highly
risky oral-anal contact among the men, said Megan Reller,
an epidemiologist with the US Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention.
The CDC labeled typhoid a sexually
transmitted disease for the first time at a conference in
Atlanta this week..."
Entire article is posted at http://www.cnn.com/2001/HEALTH/conditions/04/26/typhoid.sex.ap/
New Typhoid Vaccine For
Young Children
A new vaccine will
allow doctors to immunize children younger than 5 against
typhoid fever, a disease that affects 16 million people worldwide
and kills 600,000 every year...
The researchers plan to begin trials
of the new vaccine in infants late this year.
If their findings are confirmed in babies,
Drs. Richard Guerrant and Margaret Kosek of the University
of Virginia wrote in an editorial, "this vaccine will
provide another exciting advance in the fight against an increasingly
resistant, highly virulent pathogen of poverty...
"This is exciting. It really is an
important advance, especially in what are really diseases
now of inadequate water and sanitation," Guerrant, a
geographic medicine professor, said in an interview. He said,
however, that the vaccine can't be considered a substitute
for development and improved sanitation...
Doctors treat only about 400 cases
of typhoid each year in the United States, and 70 percent
of those people caught the disease during travel in developing
nations, according to the US Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention.
However, typhoid is very common in India
and developing countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America.
In many of those countries, the germ is resistant to common
antibiotics, forcing doctors to use those in a more expensive
group, Szu said..."
CDC
April 26, 2001
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