Assistant Professor, Community Medicine Department, Mediciti Institute of Medical Sciences, Ghanpur Village, Medchal Mandal, Rangareddy District, Telangana
*Corresponding author: Dr. M Surya Durga Prasad, Assistant Professor, Community Medicine Department, Mediciti Institute of Medical Sciences, Ghanpur Village, Medchal Mandal, Rangareddy District, Telangana, Email ID: surya354@gmail.com
Diphtheria is an acute infectious disease caused by toxigenic strains of Corynebacterium diphtheria. It is imperative that early clinical diagnosis should guide initiation of therapy, since delay in treatment may result in severe complications or death.
To assess socio-demographic profile and immunization status of diphtheria cases admitted in Sir Ronald Ross Institute of Tropical & Communicable Diseases, Nallakunta, Hyderabad (SRRITD).
It's a hospital based cross sectional study done by administering a semi structured schedule to all the cases of diphtheria admitted in SRRITD in the month of November 2010. Data was entered and analyzed using MS Excel 2007.
A total of 76 cases (36 females and 40 males) of diphtheria cases were admitted in the hospital and majority of them were in the age group above 16 years (47.4%). In this series most of them belong to middle socioeconomic status (52.6%) than lower (28.9%) and upper class (18.5%). Majority of cases are partially immunized (48.7%) than fully immunized (32.9%) and unimmunized (18.4%). The duration of illness prior to hospitalization is mostly 3 days in 30.2% cases and ≥ 5 days in 26.3% cases.
A shift in age incidence has been observed from less than 5 years to more than 5 years and this highlight the need for booster injections of diphtheria toxoid.
Diphtheria, Immunization
