Prevalence of typhoid carriers after treatment with chloramphenicol

William Budd (1)) anticipating the discovery of the typhoid bacillus by 24 years, probably intuited the existence of carriers when he said that “the first case may be foreign or may be due to the local poison that arises, like a fire from its ashes, as a sleeping legacy from a similar previous outbreak.” At the end of the nineteenth century, Koch demonstrated clearly the role of the human being as a reservoir. Petruscky and Cushing (1898) were the first to communicate the finding of typhoid bacilli in the excreta of cured cases up to five years after the acute episode. Anton and Ftitterer (1888) and Chiari, Dupre, and Chantemasse (1891) made classic studies describing the carrier. Ever since Drigalsky and Conradi (1904, 1907) (2)) many bacteriological and epidemiological researchers have suggested that carriers, by causing localized outbreaks, must play a very important role in keeping the disease endemic. The proportion of clinically cured patients who remain carriers has varied according to place, treatment method used, length of observation, criteria used for definition, and other factors. The findings prior to the ad-