<i>Salmonella Typhi</i> mimicking Pott's disease: A case report and review of the literature
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Infectious spondylodiscitis, an infection that involves the intervertebral disc and adjacent vertebral body, often manifests as back pain, fever, and malaise. Although Staphylococcus aureus is the most commonly reported cause of infectious spondylodiscitis, other atypical organisms can also cause spinal infections. Salmonella enterica serovar Typhi has been rarely reported to cause spondylodiscitis. Method: Retrospective single-record review with informed written consent from the patient. Results: We present the case of an immunocompetent 67-year-old female patient with subacute intermittent back pain, weight loss, and a history of prolonged travel to India. MRI showed destructive T7–T8 spondylodiscitis with vertebral collapse, kyphotic deformity, and severe canal stenosis. Given the patient's presentation, epidemiology, and radiologic features, spinal tuberculosis was initially suspected. A biopsy of the spinal tissue grew S. Typhi by the third day of incubation. The patient was treated with a 6-week course of intravenous ceftriaxone. The patient's symptoms resolved over the course of treatment, and she remained clinically well with no signs of recurrent infection at 12-month follow-up. Conclusion: This case highlights S. Typhi as a rare cause of spondylodiscitis in immunocompetent individuals that can mimic Pott's disease clinically and radiographically. This case exemplifies the importance of maintaining a broad differential when evaluating spondylodiscitis, especially in patients who travel to regions that are endemic for atypical pathogens.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".