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How Did Typhoid Fever Go Away Without a Vaccine?

By / / chlorination, hygiene, measles, morbidity, mortality graphs, mortality vs morbidity, pasteurization, pertussis, sanitation, typhoid fever, Typhoid Mary

As you have seen, anti-vaccine influencers like to use mortality charts to trick folks into thinking that vaccines don’t work. They especially like to use them with diseases for which we don’t routinely use a vaccine, like typhoid fever.

The introduction of water filtration and chlorination had a big effect on typhoid fever in the early 20th century. The typhoid vaccine helped too! You can see the effects in this chart.
The introduction of water filtration and chlorination had a big effect on typhoid fever in the early 20th century. So did pasteurization, as milk borne typhoid fever was also a thing.

So how did typhoid fever go away without a vaccine?

How Did Typhoid Fever Go Away Without a Vaccine?

Well, in addition to the fact that typhoid fever hasn’t totally gone away, a typhoid vaccine has been available since 1896!

“There are two vaccines to prevent typhoid fever. One is an inactivated (killed) vaccine and the other is a live, attenuated (weakened) vaccine. Your health care provider can help you decide which type of typhoid vaccine is best for you.”

Typhoid Vaccine Information Statements

And we now have two typhoid vaccines in the United States, although they are mainly used for folks who travel to high risk areas. Newer and better conjugate typhoid vaccines are available in other countries.

Although not as widely used as other vaccines, they can help protect against infections with the Salmonella serotype Typhi bacteria which causes typhoid fever.

“5,700 illnesses and 620 hospitalizations are estimated to occur in the United States each year. Most people are infected while traveling internationally.”

About Typhoid Fever and Paratyphoid Fever

But it is true that these vaccines are not the big reason that typhoid fever declined so much in developed countries.

“By the 1930s, typhoid was no longer a major waterborne public health challenge in Oxford but a low-lying endemic threat posed by undetected chronic carriers and poor food hygiene.”

How was typhoid eliminated in the past?

In this case, as typhoid is spread through food, drinks, and water that has been contaminated with the Salmonella bacteria, it truly was improved sanitation and hygiene that helped get it under better control.

But improved sanitation and hygiene didn’t eradicate typhoid fever!

“After 1945, new technologies such as vaccination, targeted carrier identification, and effective antibiotic treatments enabled local authorities to launch a successful campaign of targeted local eradication.”

How was typhoid eliminated in the past?

Other factors helped, including newer typhoid vaccines, antibiotics, and finding carriers – think Typhoid Mary!

Explaining the Typhoid Fever Case Chart

But if we didn’t use a vaccine to eliminate it, why do the typhoid fever graphs and charts look a lot like the charts we see for vaccine preventable diseases?

That’s easy.

Just because we didn’t use a vaccine doesn’t mean we didn’t do anything at all, right?

A decline in cases or deaths on the charts typically comes after some intervention is introduced and it doesn’t have to be a vaccine, it just has to be something that works.

Interestingly, unlike most of the mortality charts that they use for vaccine preventable diseases, in the case of typhoid, they chose to post a morbidity chart – cases of typhoid.

Why is that interesting?

Looking at this chart, you can see that cases of measles didn't drop until we got a vaccine.
Cases of measles didn’t drop until we got a vaccine. And even though measles deaths dropped from their highs at the beginning of the 20th century, about 4-500 people were still dying each year with measles in the US in the pre-vaccine era.

Because when you look at the effects of better hygiene and nutrition, it helped improve the mortality of many diseases like measles and pertussis, but not so much their morbidity. So the same number of people got sick, but fewer died. That’s good, but unfortunately, many did still die. Anti-vax folks just hide them in their mortality graphs. These graphs show cases and deaths per 100,000 people, leaving it to you to figure out that they from a population of hundreds of millions of people, which usually translates to hundreds of deaths.

Better hygiene and sanitation didn't help whooping cough, it was the vaccine.
Better hygiene and sanitation didn’t help whooping cough. That was the pertussis vaccine! And although the chart makes it seem like there were few deaths, understand that in 1950, with over 120,000 cases of pertussis, there were 1,100 deaths!

Now with typhoid, fewer people got sick too.

So what does all of this mean?

Mostly that you can safely ignore propaganda from anti-vaccine influencers who try to use these charts to scare you away from thinking that vaccines work!

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Last Updated on August 2, 2024