Typhoid bacterial strains in India are already resistant to the cheapest first and second line of antibiotics
In 2017, when clinician scientist Gagandeep Kang and her colleagues started an extensive typhoid surveillance study across India, the general perception among the scientific community was that typhoid was significantly declining based on the data reported by big hospitals in India
But when Kang’s team began to closely study people at the community level, it found about 20-fold increase in typhoid cases, mostly children, at most study centres in comparison to the numbers reported by the hospitals