"After the recent malaria concerns, it is now the turn of an antibiotic-resistant superbug strain of typhoid bacterium that is spreading globally and posing a public health threat. A landmark genomic study, with contributors from over two dozen countries, and led by Vanessa Wong, an infectious-disease specialist at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Hinxton, UK, sequenced the genomes of more than 1,800 S Typhi samples from 63 countries. The study shows the H58 strain of S Typhi arising from an unrecognised epidemic in Africa is displacing established typhoid fever strains, completely transforming the genetic architecture of the disease. The resistant strain comprised 47% of the samples and showed widespread resistance to a number of antibiotics, reports Nature. "Global surveillance at this scale is critical to address the ever-increasing public health threat caused by multidrug resistant typhoid," says Vanessa Wong. Overuse of older antibiotics has helped drive the H58 epidemic in Africa, believes the team which has also begun to see cases of resistance to newer antibiotics, such as fluoroquinolones and azithromycin..."