AUTHORS
Kristen Aiemjoy, Jessica C Seidman, Senjuti Saha, Sira Jam Munira, Mohammad Saiful Islam Sajib, Syed Muktadir Al Sium, Anik Sarkar, Nusrat Alam, Farha Nusrat Zahan, Md Shakiul Kabir, Dipesh Tamrakar, Krista Vaidya, Rajeev Shrestha, Jivan Shakya, Nishan Katuwal, Sony Shrestha, Mohammad Tahir Yousafzai, Junaid Iqbal, Irum Fatima Dehraj, Yasmin Ladak, Noshi Maria, Mehreen Adnan, Sadaf Pervaiz, Alice S Carter, Ashley T Longley, Clare Fraser, Edward T Ryan, Ariana Nodoushani, Alessio Fasano, Maureen M Leonard, Victoria Kenyon, Isaac I Bogoch, Hyon Jin Jeon, Andrea Haselbeck, Se Eun Park, Raphaël M Zellweger, Florian Marks, Ellis Owusu-Dabo, Yaw Adu-Sarkodie, Michael Owusu, Peter Teunis, Stephen P Luby, Denise O Garrett, Farah Naz Qamar, Samir K Saha, Richelle C Charles, Jason R Andrews
ABSTRACT
Background: The incidence of enteric fever, an invasive bacterial infection caused by typhoidal Salmonellae (Salmonella enterica serovars Typhi and Paratyphi), is largely unknown in regions without blood culture surveillance. The aim of this study was to evaluate whether new diagnostic serological markers for typhoidal Salmonella can reliably estimate population-level incidence.
Methods: We collected longitudinal blood samples from patients with blood culture-confirmed enteric fever enrolled from surveillance studies in Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, and Ghana between 2016 and 2021 and conducted cross-sectional serosurveys in the catchment areas of each surveillance site. We used ELISAs to measure quantitative IgA and IgG antibody responses to hemolysin E and S Typhi lipopolysaccharide. We used Bayesian hierarchical models to fit two-phase power-function decay models to the longitudinal antibody responses among enteric fever cases and used the joint distributions of the peak antibody titres and decay rate to estimate population-level incidence rates from cross-sectional serosurveys.
Findings: The longitudinal antibody kinetics for all antigen-isotypes were similar across countries and did not vary by clinical severity. The seroincidence of typhoidal Salmonella infection among children younger than 5 years ranged between 58·5 per 100 person-years (95% CI 42·1-81·4) in Dhaka, Bangladesh, to 6·6 per 100 person-years (4·3-9·9) in Kavrepalanchok, Nepal, and followed the same rank order as clinical incidence estimates.
Interpretation: The approach described here has the potential to expand the geographical scope of typhoidal Salmonella surveillance and generate incidence estimates that are comparable across geographical regions and time.
Funding: Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Click here to read the entire article on The Lancet Microbe.
