‘Drug-resistant typhoid is the final warning sign’: disease spreads in Pakistan as antibiotics fail

Typhoid, also known as enteric fever, is an infection caused by contaminated food or water. If left untreated, it kills one in five. But the cure is a simple course of antibiotics. Most people, if they get the drugs promptly, should start recovering within a few days.

But the antibiotics used to cure typhoid are now failing. The bacteria, Salmonella typhi, have developed resistance to the antibiotics meant to kill them. It’s a pattern repeated across the world; the problem of resistant infections is global and borderless. And children across the village – on the outskirts of Peshawar, northern Pakistan – had been falling ill.

The hospital was rammed. On the children’s ward, each single bed held four or five patients.

“Typhoid was once treatable with a set of pills and now ends up with patients in hospital,” says Jehan Zeb Khan, the clinical pharmacist at the hospital.

Infection was caused by extensively drug resistant (XDR) typhoid – a strain of “superbug” that emerged in Pakistan in 2016. XDR-typhoid is resistant to almost all of the antibiotics that are supposed to treat the disease, so options are limited and death rates are higher.