A Very Catholic Antibiotic

Just last week, researchers published a paper detailing a fantastic discovery: an incredibly effective new treatment for the widespread disease typhoid fever. The best part? All they need 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, especially in communities that lack access to clean water, sanitation materials, and medical aid. Typhoid is caused by the 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 out of a total 9 million infected each year dying. Not only can the disease itself be deadly, but it can lead to complications which can themselves be extremely dangerous, such as pneumonia and severe dehydration. 

A further problem with typhoid fever is that it is beginning to develop resistance to antibiotics, which have so far been the most effective and common treatment. That problem, however,has been remedied for the time being by a team of researchers who 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 nearly all that were resistant to other antibiotics. Even more exciting: Rifampin is already a common drug in many of the most affected countries, as it’s 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. The bacteria, however, evolve defense mechanisms against such attacks, such as shoots that draw out the antibiotic. Rifampin does not do this. In fact, it doesn’t attack the bacteria directly at all.

Now, each bacterial 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 out to destroy the foreign cells from the start. Rifampin, instead of infiltrating the bacteria itself, simply 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’s mode of attack may also be extremely effective against certain other bacterial infections, including some that are far more dangerous than Typhoid. Bacterial pneumonia, one of the other possible targets, can have up to a 30% fatality rate, depending on the circumstances. Rifampin, however, may be as powerful in this case as it was in that of Typhoid, though more experiment is required to know for certain.

This discovery is a fantastic example of how science fits with our Catholic Faith. It’s not simply that the Faith shows us our obligation to Charity, to love for neighbor. Typhoid fever affects poor countries far more than it does wealthy ones. In one recentyear, for example, the United States had one death from typhoid fever. Yet 110,000 die from it across the world each year. It is a disease disproportionately affecting and damaging the poor and those in difficult circumstances. The research that contributed to this drug, however, and that will be of such use to those in need of it, originated in the first world, in places of wealth. As many are the problems with, and evils perpetrated by, the richer countries of our world, this scientific progress has an amazing possibility to benefit the poor. “The first shall be last,” and indeed it is the duty of the first to put *themselves* last, to give all they can to those with less. That, science has done here.

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: that Faith and science are deeply intertwined and necessary to one another, not opposing. Truth knows truth, and builds on truth. The knowledge the Faith gives us of ethics, of how we ought to act, is put to good use when implemented in science. And the knowledge of science is best used when guided by that truth of Faith.