Targeting the virus that infects the disease-causing bacterium could be a cheap way to prioritize populations for vaccination campaigns.
The approach offers a proof of principle for cheap, quick and wide-scale surveillance, and can test the effectiveness of efforts to prevent the disease’s spread, says Senjuti Saha, a molecular microbiologist at the Child Health Research Foundation in Dhaka, who was involved in both studies.serotype Typhi, which contaminates food and water. Every year it affects some 14 million people globally, causing fever and diarrhoea, and kills more than 135,000.
In the latest studies, the researchers decided to instead hunt for the viruses that infect the bacterium, known as bacteriophages, or phages. Bacteriophages tend to survive longer in the environment than do their bacterial hosts. “If there are phages present, it means the host bacteria that they infect have to have been present,” says Ana Lanham, an environmental biotechnologist at the University of Lisbon.
Bacteriophages were detected in some 31% of the 211 samples collected in Dhaka, a city known to have a high typhoid burden, compared with only 3% of the 92 samples from Mirzapur, which has a low burden. These results corresponded with data collected in hospitals — some 5% of 4,620 blood samples taken from the two largest paediatric hospitals in Dhaka containedThe Nepalese team noticed a similar correlation.
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