Typhoid Mary spread typhoid to up to 200 people in her lifetime.
How did Mary Mallon (Typhoid Mary) carry the bacteria without herself being affected? Did she carry this disease inside of her? Did her body tolerate and house this bacteria without being affected by it?
IIRC she had an asymptomatic S. typhi infection of her gallbladder. The bacteria were happily reproducing in her gallbladder, and she shed bacteria everytime she went to the toilet, she probably wasn’t too clever when it came to washing her hands.
There were no antibiotics so the only treatment they could have given her, had they even known how she was spreading it, was a cholecystectomy.
Some people just don’t get sick when they’re infected with pathogens that make everybody else ill. These people carry the disease without feeling the ill effects, and because they don’t feel sick don’t seek treatment and so they can carry the pathogen around for a long time. Nowadays one would hope that a public health epidemiologist would track down an asymptomatic carrier during an outbreak by tracing back through the aymptomatic patients looking for commonalities.
should read: symptomatic
Typhoid Mary (and Cecil’s take on her).
And a fairly interesting book about her by Anthony Bourdain…
these bacteria or this bacterium
What other diseases cann Man “carry” without actually being sick?
Almost anything infectious, including HIV. Most people get antibodies to the glandular fever (Infectious mononucleosis) virus during childhood but only a small minority actually suffer from it, for example.
location, location, location