That shift matters because the disease has never really gone away. Recent estimates suggest that typhoid and paratyphoid fevers<\/a> still cause on the order of ten to twenty million illnesses<\/a> and around 100,000 deaths every year, mostly in low- and middle-income countries where safe drinking water and sanitation are not guaranteed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the same time, antimicrobial resistance is rising across many bacteria<\/a>. By the count of the World Health Organization, drug-resistant infections directly killed about 1.2 million people in 2019 and contributed to nearly five million deaths, more than HIV and malaria combined.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In this context, the new typhoid data sound like an alarm bell. In a large genomic study, scientists sequenced 3,489 typhoid isolates from patients in Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan and India, then combined them with thousands of older samples to track how resistance travels across borders over time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The team found that extensively drug-resistant Typhi, which shrugs off standard oral antibiotics, has taken hold in Pakistan and is now the dominant strain there. It has already seeded cases in more than a dozen other countries through international travel, including destinations in Africa, the Middle East, Europe, North America and Asia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n They documented repeated examples of strains that resist older drugs such as ampicillin and chloramphenicol as well as newer oral drugs such as fluoroquinolones and third generation cephalosporins. For many patients, especially in crowded cities with limited hospital access, the only remaining convenient option is the macrolide azithromycin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So what happens if that last pill stops working? The same research and follow up studies are already picking up azithromycin resistance mutations in typhoid strains across South Asia and even in imported cases in the United States.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As infectious disease specialist Jason R. Andrews puts it, “The speed at which highly resistant strains of S. Typhi have emerged and spread in recent years is a real cause for concern.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n Typhoid spreads through contaminated food and water, which makes this story as much about pipes, sewers and climate as it is about pills. When heavy rain overwhelms drainage or floods pit latrines, sewage can spill into rivers, wells and household storage tanks, and the risk of typhoid rises sharply. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Picture a child filling a cup from a street side tap<\/a> after school or a family rinsing vegetables for dinner in water that looks clear but is contaminated upstream. Add hotter weather, more intense downpours and aging infrastructure, and suddenly that everyday routine becomes part of a much larger climate and health problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\nRead More: Goodbye to total eclipses: every year, the Moon moves a little further away… and the most visible consequence has a date<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
What scientists are seeing in the lab<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Why dirty water and a warming climate matter<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Read More: NASA is once again highlighting an image taken on July 3, 2025, from the ISS that looks like something out of a movie: a \u201cgigantic jet\u201d that doesn\u2019t fall to Earth, but instead shoots out of a storm and rises to a height of nearly 100 kilometers<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n