Diagnosis of Salmonella typhi by Culture of Duodenal String Capsule

To the Editor: The present outbreak of typhoid fever in the city of Lima has made it imperative for us to improve the bacteriologic diagnosis of this disease.^1,2 On the assumption that duodenal secretions might contain appreciable numbers of Salmonella typhi during the illness, we have started sampling these contents with a string-capsule procedure.³ The sampling period was reduced to three hours, enabling us to include ambulatory patients. We obtained the best results by dropping a 25-cm length of the bile-stained string into selenite enrichment broth. This procedure was tested against the highly successful bone-marrow culture^1,2 and a single blood.