Mayo Clinic Health Manager
Get free personalized health guidance for you and your family.
Get Started
About our e-newsletters
- Free e-newsletters
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- We do not share your e-mail address
Housecall, our weekly general-interest e-newsletter, keeps you up to date on a wide variety of health topics with timely, reliable, practical information, recipes, blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts and more. Our biweekly topic-specific e-newsletters also include blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts, and other useful information that will help you manage your health.
Housecall Archives
Mayo Clinic Housecall
Stay up to date on the latest health information.
What you get
- Free weekly e-newsletter
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- Recipes, tools and other helpful information
- We do not share your e-mail address
Tests and diagnosis
By Mayo Clinic staff
Medical and travel history
Your doctor is likely to suspect typhoid fever based on your symptoms and your medical and travel history. But the diagnosis is usually confirmed by identifying S. typhi in a culture of your blood or other body fluid or tissue.
Blood or body fluid or tissue culture
For the culture, a small sample of your blood, stool, urine or bone marrow is placed on a special medium that encourages the growth of bacteria. In 48 to 72 hours, the culture is checked under a microscope for the presence of typhoid bacteria. A bone marrow culture often is the most sensitive test for S. typhi.
Antibody and antigen testing
Your doctor may recommend other tests to help diagnose typhoid fever, such as:
- Enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). This blood test looks for an antigen that's specific to typhoid bacteria. An antigen is any substance, such as a virus, bacterium, toxin or foreign protein, that triggers an immune system response in your body. An ELISA test can identify if you carry the disease, but not whether you have an active infection.
- Fluorescent antibody test. This test checks for antibodies to S. typhi. Antibodies are proteins produced by your immune system in response to harmful substances (antigens). Each antibody is unique and defends your body against a single antigen.
