KARACHI: The cases of typhoid have seen an unprecedented surge this year, particularly in the last four months, it emerged on Tuesday.

Sources said that Karachi also saw a rise in the number of bacte-rial infection cases, 70 to 80 per cent of which were of extensivelydrug resistant (XDR) typhoid. The strain was hard to treat as this was resistant to commonly-used antibiotics, thereby increasing the risk of complications.

`The typhoid cases are up this year in Karachi, which suggests that the situation would be far worse in the flood-affected areas already grappling with several other infections,` said Dr Khalid Shafi of the Pakistan Paediatric Association (PPA).

Typhoid cases, he explained, had gone down drastically after the government launched a vacci-nation campaign to tackle the 2019 outbreak.

`This year, however, we have been witnessing an increase in the number of typhoid cases, which highlights the need for a special vaccination drive for children under the age of 15,` he said.

About the flood-affected areas, Dr Shafi said the PPA was trying to provide shelters to the homeless in those areas.

`We have shifted our focus towards the construction of houses there because we found it dif ficult to carry out relief efforts in an organised manner as people crowd camps, making assessment oftheir individual needs tough.,` he added.

The health department data showed that 207,763 typhoid cases were recorded from January to October in the province -14,475 cases in January; 16,190 in February; 17,637 in March; 16,654 in April; 18,256 in May; 18,884 in June; 18,327 in July; 23,796 in Aug; 34,462 in September and 29,073 in October.

The hotspots for typhoid cases are: Mirpurkhas, Sanghar, Jacobabad, Larkana, Qambar, Khairpur, Shaheed Benazirabad, Naushahro Feroze, Dadu, Hyderabad, Jamshoro, Thatta andKorangi.

Dr Abdul Ghafoor Shoro of the Pakistan Medical Association, who has been regularly visiting the flood-affected areas, said there had not been any improvement on the ground.

`There are still many areas and roads submerged by floodwater.

Water-borne diseases are rampant everywhere, but there is more concern towards typhoid because it has a strain that`s difficult to treat,` he said, adding that the association was engaged in training doctors in the flood-affected areas for the management of water-borne diseases.