A comparative study of Typhidot and Widal tests for the detection and diagnosis of Typhoid fever in patients.

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MAY, 2016
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Abstract
Typhoid fever continues to be a public health issue in most developing countries. In Ghana, Typhoid Fever ranks among the first twenty causes of outpatient illness. Among the numerous challenges in addressing the disease burden of Typhoid is the quest to secure a more reliable and standardized laboratory diagnoses of Salmonella infections to be able to win the surveillance battle on Typhoid fever. The purpose of this study was to compare the specificity and sensitivity of Typhidot and Widal serological tests for the detection of typhoid fever in the Bekwai Municipality. A prospective hospital based longitudinal study was conducted by gathering samples of 292 potential patients who showed features of Typhoid infection. Adopting a purposive sampling technique, patients who met the inclusion criteria were conveniently sampled and enrolled. Blood culture was used as the standard protocol after which sensitivity, specificity and positive predictive values were compared between Typhidot and Widal serological test kits. Data was analyzed using SPSS version 20 to process after which results were presented descriptively. Chi square test of association was performed for categorical variables .The study on 292 individuals recorded sensitivity of widal (95%) and typhidot (85.8%) with the specificity of widal (54.0%) and Typhidot (90.1%). This observation indicates Widal test is much more sensitive than the typhidot in the study area. The study established that both tests could be equally, sensitive and specific in diagnosing typhoid since they both had an equal accuracy (98.0) making them suitable for rapid diagnosis. The study found high detection of S. typhi by blood culture diagnosis, with S. paratyphi and S. typhimurun occurring least. This study has implication for further study to be carried out for confirmatory purposes as well as to determine prevalence of infection and antigenic variants that were not captured in the present study.
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A Thesis Submitted to the Department of Clinical Microbiology, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirement for the Degree of Master of Philosophy (Clinical Microbiology).
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