So What Happened To Typhoid Fever?
So how do you catch typhoid fever? Well you can still get it. I suppose the best bet would be if you're on vacation in a faraway place where the disease is not as controlled as it is here...
This is the layman's story for other laymen. I'm not a doctor or in any medical profession but I was watching television, a story about Abraham Lincoln and in it was a part that showed how his son passed away soon after the start of the Civil War from typhoid fever. Then I thought to myself, what is typhoid fever anyway? I don't really know. So I looked it up on the Internet and here is what I found out. Typhoid fever is caused by bacteria to my surprise. I thought maybe it was a virus since it seems so powerful of a disease. Plus I found out right away that there is another thing called typhus but it's not the same thing at all. Typhus is caused by different bacteria so we won't even go in the direction.
Typhoid fever is caused by a form of Salmonella. Salmonella is in the news a lot because people get sick from eating food contaminated by Salmonella all the time. Somehow all this food gets contaminated lying out in a field somewhere in another state. Who knows where or how? People get pretty sick from it, usually diarrhea and fever and then people start internal bleeding in the intestines and then they die because it is a very serious disease. People used to die from typhoid fever all the time, even going back as far as old Greece. The famous Greek leader named Pericles died during an epidemic of typhoid fever. This is known because historians have discovered writings about it.
So how do you catch typhoid fever? Well you can still get it. I suppose the best bet would be if you're on vacation in a faraway place where the disease is not as controlled as it is here. The disease is spread in two main ways. Number one would be the drinking water. If that has fecal matter from the intestines of a sick person or formerly sick person and you drink it, you can get typhoid fever. The second fastest way is insects like flies landing on fecal matter and then landing on your lunch. That sounds pretty yucky to me. Either way it has to be a direct contact. A contact where the bacteria has to live through the situation, plus has to get into your mouth, and then has to get into your intestines, where it can do the most damage.
If you are in a place where it is possible to get typhoid fever the number one thing would be to boil your water and wash your hands when you leave a bathroom. Before you go on a vacation like this you should get a shot help you fight this terrible disease off. These shots are only 50 to 80% effective so there is still a chance you can get typhoid fever. As a matter of fact back in the old days in Europe people used to get beer instead of water to drink. They thought there was some magic in beer that protect protected them from getting sick but that was a mistake. The actual process of manufacturing beer requires boiling the water first as part of the fire brewed process. So they were drinking boiled water and didn't know that was the important part. One other thing that you may not have thought about is if you have any water well and a septic tank system. The septic tank system could slightly possibly leach contaminated water into the well.
If you get typhoid fever you can be treated with penicillin type drugs and other antibiotics like Cipro. It's very important that you do not put this treatment off because typhoid fever bacteria likes to eat intestines and put holes in them so if that goes on too long you will need surgery to stitch up these holes. On the other hand lots of these penicillin and Cipro type of antibiotics are not working very well anymore because these bacteria are building up a resistance. Or what was actually happening is all the bacteria that could be killed easily are dead and the bacteria that are left over are the stronger ones. I guess you could call this Darwin's theory of how the strong will survive. People can also have a resistance to this bacterium. In other words they can catch it and keep it and pass it around without even knowing they have it. One of the worst of these cases was a gal named Mary Mallon. In 1907 she was working as a cook in a New York restaurant and she was a carrier of typhoid fever. She probably didn't wash her hands off when she should have and she spread the disease to 53 people which three people died. She was the first person traced down for a disease. The government ended up putting her in quarantine for 26 years.
So why then did the occurrence of typhoid fever drop down so dramatically that we don't hear about it anymore? Typhoid Fever is a famous name, but mostly from history. It could come back if things change in a big way, like some sort of World War III where a breakout of anarchy would rule the world. Meanwhile typhoid fever was put out to pasture by the use of chlorine in the drinking water. Chlorine kills bacteria before it gets to your house without having to boil the water. This bacterium has killed an awful lot of people throughout time. Many of them famous and rich and important, it doesn't really seem to matter. Back before chlorine, if there was an epidemic this thing would kill a lot of people.
This is the layman's story for other laymen. I'm not a doctor or in any medical profession but I was watching television, a story about Abraham Lincoln and in it was a part that showed how his son passed away soon after the start of the Civil War from typhoid fever. Then I thought to myself, what is typhoid fever anyway? I don't really know. So I looked it up on the Internet and here is what I found out. Typhoid fever is caused by bacteria to my surprise. I thought maybe it was a virus since it seems so powerful of a disease. Plus I found out right away that there is another thing called typhus but it's not the same thing at all. Typhus is caused by different bacteria so we won't even go in the direction.
Typhoid fever is caused by a form of Salmonella. Salmonella is in the news a lot because people get sick from eating food contaminated by Salmonella all the time. Somehow all this food gets contaminated lying out in a field somewhere in another state. Who knows where or how? People get pretty sick from it, usually diarrhea and fever and then people start internal bleeding in the intestines and then they die because it is a very serious disease. People used to die from typhoid fever all the time, even going back as far as old Greece. The famous Greek leader named Pericles died during an epidemic of typhoid fever. This is known because historians have discovered writings about it.
So how do you catch typhoid fever? Well you can still get it. I suppose the best bet would be if you're on vacation in a faraway place where the disease is not as controlled as it is here. The disease is spread in two main ways. Number one would be the drinking water. If that has fecal matter from the intestines of a sick person or formerly sick person and you drink it, you can get typhoid fever. The second fastest way is insects like flies landing on fecal matter and then landing on your lunch. That sounds pretty yucky to me. Either way it has to be a direct contact. A contact where the bacteria has to live through the situation, plus has to get into your mouth, and then has to get into your intestines, where it can do the most damage.
If you are in a place where it is possible to get typhoid fever the number one thing would be to boil your water and wash your hands when you leave a bathroom. Before you go on a vacation like this you should get a shot help you fight this terrible disease off. These shots are only 50 to 80% effective so there is still a chance you can get typhoid fever. As a matter of fact back in the old days in Europe people used to get beer instead of water to drink. They thought there was some magic in beer that protect protected them from getting sick but that was a mistake. The actual process of manufacturing beer requires boiling the water first as part of the fire brewed process. So they were drinking boiled water and didn't know that was the important part. One other thing that you may not have thought about is if you have any water well and a septic tank system. The septic tank system could slightly possibly leach contaminated water into the well.
If you get typhoid fever you can be treated with penicillin type drugs and other antibiotics like Cipro. It's very important that you do not put this treatment off because typhoid fever bacteria likes to eat intestines and put holes in them so if that goes on too long you will need surgery to stitch up these holes. On the other hand lots of these penicillin and Cipro type of antibiotics are not working very well anymore because these bacteria are building up a resistance. Or what was actually happening is all the bacteria that could be killed easily are dead and the bacteria that are left over are the stronger ones. I guess you could call this Darwin's theory of how the strong will survive. People can also have a resistance to this bacterium. In other words they can catch it and keep it and pass it around without even knowing they have it. One of the worst of these cases was a gal named Mary Mallon. In 1907 she was working as a cook in a New York restaurant and she was a carrier of typhoid fever. She probably didn't wash her hands off when she should have and she spread the disease to 53 people which three people died. She was the first person traced down for a disease. The government ended up putting her in quarantine for 26 years.
So why then did the occurrence of typhoid fever drop down so dramatically that we don't hear about it anymore? Typhoid Fever is a famous name, but mostly from history. It could come back if things change in a big way, like some sort of World War III where a breakout of anarchy would rule the world. Meanwhile typhoid fever was put out to pasture by the use of chlorine in the drinking water. Chlorine kills bacteria before it gets to your house without having to boil the water. This bacterium has killed an awful lot of people throughout time. Many of them famous and rich and important, it doesn't really seem to matter. Back before chlorine, if there was an epidemic this thing would kill a lot of people.
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