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| Month
Day,2003 |
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Officials
Document Typhoid Outbreak
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By Erin McClam
Associated
Press Writer
ATLANTA
- Health officials say they have documented the nation's first sexually transmitted
outbreak of typhoid fever, a rare disease usually spread through tainted food
and water.
A Cincinnati man passed typhoid to seven other men in the city
who had sex with him last summer, federal researchers said Wednesday. It is treatable
with antibiotics, but is occasionally fatal for victims who do not seek treatment.
Typhoid is most often transmitted by swallowing food and water contaminated
with human feces, which harbors a type of salmonella that causes the disease.
But health officials found that none of the Cincinnati men shared food or drink.
The disease likely circulated by highly risky oral-anal contact among
the men, said Megan Reller, an epidemiologist with the U.S. Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention.
The CDC labeled typhoid a sexually transmitted
disease for the first time at a conference in Atlanta this week, urging infected
patients to stop all sexual contact until they are clear of the disease.
Judith
Wasserheit, STD prevention chief at the CDC, said the discovery was disturbing
but not necessarily surprising.
"We are seeing substantial increases in
sexually transmitted diseases among men who have sex with men in multiple locations
across this country," she said.
Typhoid is marked by high fever, weakness,
headache and, in some cases, flat, red spots on the skin.
About 400 cases
are reported annually in the United States, four-fifths of them traced to overseas
travel. Typhoid is preventable by a vaccine recommended to Americans who visit
developing nations.
CDC investigators said the Cincinnati man spread typhoid
last summer after catching it during a visit to Puerto Rico in May. It is unclear
how he originally contracted the disease, Reller said.
The man then passed
the disease to seven male sex partners, she said. An eighth man from Indianapolis
caught typhoid after visiting him for the weekend, but said the two did not have
sex. How he got typhoid is unclear.
The CDC alerted health departments
nationwide of the outbreak in August. The men were uncooperative with health officials,
making it impossible to estimate how many other men might have been exposed, Reller
said.
"Getting the sexual histories from these patients was very difficult,"
she said. "What I am sure of is that I do not know the full story of how many
contacts the other patients had."
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