What Exactly Is Typhoid Fever?

Typhoid fever is far from just a fever, typhoid can tear holes in your intestines and infect many organs in your body and it’s evolving to become more and more drug resistant.
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Simply put, typhoid is a bacterial infection that comes largely from contaminated food, water, or sewage.

Typhoid fever is caused by a salmonella bacteria, but not the salmonella that is transmitted via infected animals and consumes usually on raw meat or eggs. Typhoid is different in that it only infects humans, but it’s also pretty good at surviving outside of its human host until it gets picked up again, like by someone drinking contaminated water.

When you consume salmonella, if you’re a healthy person with a lot of gastric acid, your stomach acid will kill those salmonella preventing you from getting sick, but children, and some adults, who don't produce a lot of stomach acid have a higher susceptibility of getting a typhoid infection.

If the typhoid bacteria aren’t killed by stomach acid like they should, they travel to the terminal part of the small intestine and enter the cells lining the intestines. This provokes a massive immune response.

The typhoid bacteria get into lymphoid tissue underlying the enterocytes, called Peyer’s patches, and then into the bloodstream and the typhoid bacteria spread widely to many organs of the body, especially the liver, spleen, and bone marrow.
 
The bacteria spreads ferociously to other organs like the brain, heart, and pancreas and inflammation in these areas can cause pancreatitis, meningitis, and a whole host of other problems.

These are the most serious complications of typhoid and they happen after already being sick for 2-3 weeks. Leading up to this, the patient feels extreme fatigue set in and a fever that can gradually increase to dangerously high levels.

Other typhoid fever symptoms include headache, muscle aches, loss of appetite, diarrhea, and a rash.

Learn more about typhoid bacteria, how it spreads, and how to treat it on this episode of SICK.

#Typhoid #Bacteria #SICK #Seeker #Science #Health
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SICK is a new series that looks at how diseases actually work inside our body. We'll be visiting medical centers and talking to top researchers and doctors to uncover the mysteries of viruses, bacteria, fungi and our own immune system. Come back every Tuesday for a new episode and let us know in the comments which diseases you think we should cover next.
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Read More:
They Swallowed Live Typhoid Bacteria - On Purpose
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/0....9/28/health/typhoid-

Typhoid Fever: Pathogenesis and Immunologic Control
https://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/1....0.1056/NEJM197009242

Mary Mallon (1869-1938) and the history of typhoid fever
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p....mc/articles/PMC39599
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