No abstract

BACKGROUND Enteric fever has been very a common and many times a fatal infective disease found in developing countries and has been known to have increasing resistance to novel drugs. So, there is an urgent need for a simple, therapeutic, cost-effective medicine to treat typhoid fever & to prevent further drug resistance. METHODS It is a non-randomized, case-control study done in Paediatrics department of Dr. Prabhakar Kore Hospital & Research centre of KAHER (KLE Academy of Higher Education and Research), attached to J N Medical College, Belagavi, over a period of 18 months from June 2017 to December 2018. The study included 200 children (2-17 years of age) with positive Widal result, uncomplicatedenteric fever; in this cohort, 100 children were treated using (oral, low dose, for short duration of 6 days) Azithromycin and remaining 100 children were treated with (intravenous, 7 days) Ceftriaxone. Each child was assessed clinically every day, & study results were captured as clinical and microbiological cure or failure, at the end of either drug regimens. This descriptive data was statistically analysed in SPSS-20.0 software. The p-value of <0.05 was taken as significant statistically. RESULTS Periods required by children for responding to drug therapy and to became afebrile i.e., defervescence were significantly (p=0.000) less with Azithromycin receiving group than ceftriaxone receiving group. 95% of children who received azithromycin showed defervescence by 5 th day of regimen but, only 29% of children receiving ceftriaxone attained defervescence by 5 th day of regimen. There was no microbiological clearance at 10 th day in only one case of ceftriaxone trial-group. Significantly (p=0.027) there was early clinical cure in azithromycin trial group as compared to ceftriaxone trial group. The microbiological cure was not comparable in either groups (p=0.135).