Treating Typhoid

Typhoid is a disease that needs long term treatment. Even though the symptoms subside soon after initiating treatment, the bacteria that causes the disease, can survive in the gut for many weeks. And prolonged antibiotic treatment without having any symptoms may lead to the patients not taking the medicines, as required. Often leading to antibiotic resistant varieties of bacteria.

Now, scientists have found that the bacteria that causes typhoid is helped by another bacteria called E.coli.

E coli, a generally useful bacteria of the gut, produces indol, a chemical signal which is used for messaging between the cells of their species. Typhoid bacteria do not produce indol.

But it has a mechanism by which it uses this chemical to develop tolerance for the antibiotic.

Scientists have been studying this type of interdependence of different bacterial species for some time now.

 But this result has immediate implication in the treatment of typhoid.

PNAS   110 (35): 14420–14425 (2013)