September 24, 2020

Typhoid Mary: The OG Super-Spreader

Happy Thursday guys!

Thought I'd go for something topical this week, now that MIss Rona is reeking more havoc again. Enter Typhoid Mary, the first known asymptomatic carrier of a disease in the U.S.

Meet Mary

Typhoid Mary's real name was Mary Mallon. She was a badass Irish immigrant born in Cookstown in 1869 and it actually would have been her 151st birthday yesterday! She traveled to the United States when she was just 15 to join the swelling immigrant population in New York. By 1900 Mary was starting to make a name for herself as a cook. Her vanilla ice cream with sliced peaches was the talk of the town and she was catering to many wealthy families.

Typhoid Fever Outbreaks

In 1906 she was hired as to cook for a wealthy banker called Charles Warren. When she was catering to his family in Oyster Bay, 6 of the 11 people in the household contracted typhoid fever *gasp*.

Warren was pretty pissed about this because rich people didn't get sick like poor people did. Health inspectors were brought in to find the source of the disease. They tested pipes, taps, toilets but everything was coming up negative. Among these inspectors was George Soper - he's the one who actually connected the dots and realised Mary was the source 🔎

Mary was still not presenting any symptoms of the disease which at the time was still fatal in 10% of cases (since us humans hadn't discovered antibiotics yet). So, she was still cooking as normal and in 1907 Soper basically began to stalk her to confirm she was the source of the outbreak, going as far as to try and steal samples of her stool and urine (gross man).

Mary went to cook for another wealthy family in New York, the Bowen family. Again there was an outbreak and this time George Soper caught her in action. Soper confronted Mary in the family's kitchen. He told her she was a carrier of the disease and she was like "Erm, no way... don't know if you've noticed but I'm not like... sick?".

The confrontation did not go well and although Soper claims he was as"diplomatic as possible", he annoyed her so much that she chased him off with a carving fork 🤬 What a lady.

 Asymptomatic super spreader

Mary had refused to give samples to Soper so he could confirm the disease, so he compiled 5 years of her working history and realised that of the 8 families she had worked for, 7 had experienced a typhoid outbreak.

However, Mary was still adamant that she was healthy and refused to cooperate with the public health services. Armed with evidence of the outbreaks around Mary, Soper notified the Health Department who arrested Mary as a public health threat. She still didn't go quietly though, and at one point someone had to sit on her to restrain her.

Quarantine

She was taken to North Brother Island to be quarantined and that's where she stayed for 3 years, being tested hundreds of times and them all coming back positive for typhoid. Under questioning she also revealed that she rarely washed her hands which explains the spread of the disease. Pretty poor show for a cook like... 🤢

Before this, an asymptomatic carrier of a disease was completely unheard of to health professionals but the tests were undeniable. They offered to remove her gall bladder which they identified as the source of the disease but she refused because she was still convinced that she didn't have it.

Her forced quarantine was controversial. Many professionals felt that they had not done enough to educate Mary on how to not transmit her disease and that her isolation was unnecessary and overly strict. She suffered a mental breakdown and her treatment schedule was hectic. She also hated the publicity of being "Typhoid Mary" and just wanted to go back to cooking.

 Second wave

After 3 years of quarantine they finally released Mary when a quarter of her samples were coming back negative. They made her promise to not work as a cook and instead she started as a laundress. After a few years though, she went back to cooking (cheeky).

And again, almost everywhere she worked; restaurants, hotels, spas, there was a typhoid outbreak. It was only when she started work at Sloane Maternity Hospital in 1915 was Soper able to track her down again. She was again quarantined on North Brother Island, where she spent the rest of her life. She died of pneumonia in 1938, still not experiencing symptoms of typhoid.

Because Mary used a number of aliases after her first quarantine in order to cook, it is hard to pinpoint the exact number of people she infected with typhoid. The confirmed number was 53 cases leading to 3 deaths but the true total is likely far higher.

Something interesting that I learned was that she was most likely born with typhoid as her mother contracted it when she was pregnant with Mary. And I'm sure we can all feel sympathy for her having to spend 26 years of her life in quarantine after spending a few months isolating ourselves!

Hope you enjoyed reading about the original super-spreader! See you again next week 👋

Hannah