Typhoid and Paratyphoid Fevers

In Korea many people considered typhoid a rather minor disease, perhaps because most adults had been exposed during childhood. Woods’s informants thought typhoid a rare disease, but he was sure that it could not be, given the poor sanitary state of Seoul (Bohm and Swartout, Jr.

Nevertheless, as diagnostic procedures improved, it became apparent that typhoid fever was the most frequent of the enteric diseases in Korea. Between 1929 and 1937 about 6,000 cases were reported annu­ally, with a fatality rate about 17 percent. During the same period, between 300 and 700 cases of paratyphoid fever were reported annually, with a fatality rate of about 7 percent (Simmons et al. 1944).