Changing pattern of typhoid fever complications in Indonesia

Abstract

Typhoid Fever has some well known complications like intestinal bleeding and perforation, peripheral circulatory failure and also complications in the liver known as typhoid hepatitis, in the heart presenting as myocarditis, or in the lungs known on typhoid bronchopneumonia. Some minor complications have been reported involving also the spine, joints or kidneys. Another major complication consisted of neuropsychiatry manifestation obscuring sometimes completely the classical picture of typhoid fever ranging from encephalopathy syndromes, meningitis, other neurological deficiences and all kinds of psychosis, transient Parkinsonism has also been observed regularly. At present, since the beginning of this decade, another disturbing complication during typhoid fever has been detected, duly reported already in the first Asian Pacific Congress of Typhoid Fever. It was a form of pancreatic disturbance at that time a novel regional finding that was thought to occur incidentally and was proposed to be termed typhoid pancreatis. As time went by this complication was reported in increasing frequencies to the effect that it has established itself now as a complication always to think of when treating typhoid fever patients in Indonesia.