A Catholic Cure

Just last week, researchers at Cornell University published a paper detailing a fantastic discovery: an incredibly effective new treatment for the widespread disease typhoid fever. The best part? All the treatment needs is an already common antibiotic. This discovery has the potential to save tens of thousands of lives around the globe.

Typhoid fever is a common bacterial illness, one that is especially prevalent in poor countries and the third world, and in communities that lack access to clean water, sanitation materials, and medical aid. Typhoid is caused by Salmonella Typhi, a bacteria that is spread through contaminated water. Typical symptoms include high fever, weakness, and abdominal pain. Some victims of the disease even experience delirium. Typhoid fever can be deadly, with 110,000 people each year dying from the disease. In addition, Typhoid can lead to complications which are themselves extremely dangerous, such as pneumonia and severe dehydration.

A further problem with typhoid fever is that it is beginning to develop a resistance to antibiotics, the most effective and common treatment for it. That problem, however, has been remedied for the time being by a team of researchers from Cornell. The researchers tested the antibiotic Rifampin as a treatment for the disease, and came up with a shocking result: Rifampin is 99.9% effective against Salmonella Typhi, killing nearly every strain, including most of those that are resistant to other antibiotics. And it gets better: Rifampin is already a common drug in many of the most affected countries, as it is also used to treat Tuberculosis. 

Why is Rifampin so incredibly effective against Typhoid? The answer lies in its unique strategy for attacking the disease, or rather, for not attacking it. You see, most antibiotics act by infiltrating the bacterial cell’s outer protective shells, and damaging it from the inside. Many bacteria, however, evolve defense mechanisms against such attacks, including shoots that draw out the antibiotic and variable-permeability shells. Rifampin avoids these by not attacking the bacteria directly in the first place.

Each S. Typhi cell has an outer shell known as a Vi capsule. These shells protect the bacteria against the host’s immune system, which is of course trying to destroy the foreign cells from the moment they enter the body. Rifampin, instead of infiltrating the bacteria itself, destroys the Vi capsule, leaving the cell vulnerable to the host’s immune system. This has proven an extremely effective treatment method, as almost none of the usual resistances developed by bacteria against antibiotics will change the outcome of this attack.

Rifampin may also be extremely effective against certain other bacterial infections, including some that are far more dangerous than Typhoid. For example, bacterial pneumonia, one of the other possible targets, can have up to a 30% fatality rate. While more experimentation is necessary, if Rifampin is effective against that disease, it could save tens or hundreds of thousands more lives.

This discovery is also a fantastic example of how science fits with our Catholic Faith. Christ calls us not only to help our neighbor, but especially to help the poor and those in particular need. In this case, that’s exactly who’s helped most. Typhoid fever effects poor countries far more than it does wealthy ones. In one recent year, for example, the United States had only one death from typhoid fever. Yet 110,000 die from it across the world each year. It is a disease disproportionately damaging the poor and those in difficult circumstances.

The research that contributed to this drug, however, research that will save so many lives, originated in the first world, in a wealthy nation. As many problems as our country has, her contributions to science continue to benefit the poor and those in most need. Science is a space in which the last can be made first, provided that research is focused in the right directions.

This reality, the inherent Catholicity of scientific endeavor in what it can do, as well as its intrinsic search for truth, is just another proof of the principle CatholicTech was founded on: Faith and science are deeply intertwined, not contrary. Truth knows truth, and builds on truth. The knowledge the Faith gives us of ethics, of how we ought to act, is put to some of its best uses when implemented in science. And the knowledge of science is best used when guided by the truths of the Faith.

Dominic Andres | PR + Communications