Typhoid in 1993.

Typhoid remains a disease of major importance world-wide although improvements in public health have made it an exotic disease in developed countries like Australia. Effective antibiotic therapy with the advent of chloramphenicol, which was first used to treat typhoid in the 1940s, has also dramatically altered the natural course of the disease and reduced its mortality rate from around 25% to as low as 1%. The main areas of recent change include the emergence of resistance to previously effective antibiotics, more aggressive intervention in the management of severe typhoid and some of its complications such as perforation, and the development of an oral typhoid vaccine that may replace the equally effective but more unpleasant parenteral vaccination that has been widely used since World War.