Assessment of Widal agglutination test in non-typhoid fevers

ABSTRACT

The present work was done as a trial for assessment of the value of Widal test in fevers other than typhoid and paratyphoid and the significance of its positivity during diagnosis of these fevers especially in confusable non classical clinical presentation. One hundred cases were studied; twenty of them were healthy Egyptian individuals. The other eighty cases were fifteen cases of enteric fevers, twenty five cases of viral hepatitis, fifteen cases of meningococcal meningitis and twenty five cases of bacterial respiratory tract infection, fifteen of them were diagnosed as pulmonary tuberculosis. Widal agglutination test was performed on the 4[th], 7[th] and 14[th] day of illness for every case. It was observed that Widal test may give erroneous information, evidenced by its positivity in a large number of the other diseases to the same extent as its negativity in typhoid cases