The world's most dangerous cook was born 148 years ago
She was called the most dangerous woman in America, was caught with the police, banned from working in her specialty and imprisoned in seclusion for more than two decades. All this happened not with a spy or a criminal, but with an ordinary cook. What is it like to be the world's most famous typhoid patient?
Imagine that the food you cook becomes deadly. Your relatives, employers, acquaintances, having tried it, feel very bad. They develop fever and diarrhea. You try to help them - but they only get worse. You change jobs one by one, but you don't stay long anywhere, and events develop according to the same scenario. Something like this felt Mary Mallon, who was later recognized as the first known to medicine a healthy carrier of typhoid fever. But let's talk about everything in order.
Mary was born on September 23, 1869 in Northern Ireland. It is speculated that her mother may have had typhoid fever during pregnancy, but it is unclear when Mary actually got the disease. When the girl was 15 years old, she moved to the United States to live with her aunt and uncle. Living with them, she first began cooking for wealthy families. The first thirty years of her life passed quietly and imperceptibly. The girl had a clear talent for cooking, and the cooks were paid more than many other servants (of course, there was no chance for an immigrant with no education to get a job in higher positions).
From 1900 to 1907, she worked as a cook in New York State, replacing seven families during this time. The owners were happy with the cooking, the problem was different: every family she went to started to get sick. During two weeks of her work in the city of Mamaronek, typhoid fever appeared, which had not been in those places for a long time. In Manhattan, where Mary Mallon moved in 1901, members of the family she served developed diarrhea and fever, and the washerwoman died.
The cook got a job with a local lawyer, but soon seven or eight of his household members fell ill. In the next place of her work, on Long Island, ten more people became infected. Local doctors made a helpless gesture, because typhoid fever was a very unusual infection for these places. But the cook was "lucky" with a job in her specialty: now she got a job with a prosperous banker Charles Warren. From August 27 to September 3, 1906, six people in his house fell ill with typhus.
Photo of a micropreparation of Salmonella enterica, the causative agent of typhoid fever / Wikimedia commons
For George Thompson, whose family rented a house, the typhoid outbreak was a shock. He understood that a house with such a reputation would never be leased out if the tenants decided that the infection came, for example, from a drinking water source. To investigate the case, Thompson hired a special man - not a detective, as you might think, but sanitary engineer George Soper, who was a typhoid specialist and had already uncovered the sources of several outbreaks.
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Soper checked the Warrens' home and family, but found nothing suspicious. However, he noticed that shortly before the outbreak, the owners hired a new cook, who quit three weeks later. Perhaps she was the reason for all the commotion?
Soper has tracked all cases of typhus in the state over the past few years. There seemed to be no special connection between them, but, testing his hypothesis, he realized that all these families had the same cook! There was little left to do: find Mary Mallon herself and find out if she was sick. According to Soper's recollections, he tried in the most delicate tone to turn to Miss Mary with a request to give him samples of urine, blood and feces for analysis, but the temperamental Irish woman brandished a fork to cut meat at him, and our detective hurried to retreat.
It is easy to understand the cook's indignation: in the United States at that time there was a stereotype about unscrupulous Irishmen, which the emigrants themselves did not like very much, especially those who got a job in the kitchen. But Soper did not lag behind her just like that: the next time he came with an assistant (albeit unsuccessfully again), then - with a friend from the local health department. But Mary Mallon was not going to give up without a fight, scolded those who came, threatened them with kitchen utensils, and when the whole company returned with five police officers, she again brandished a sharp fork at them, and then disappeared. No one had time to understand where she had disappeared.
Mary was looking for five hours. Seeing footprints leading to the fence, the police began to examine the neighboring house. A barely noticeable scratch on the wall under the grand grand staircase revealed her whereabouts - there was a very tight-fitting door leading to the closet where the cook was hiding. Resisting and cursing, she was put in an ambulance and taken to the hospital, but even on the way she darted like an angry lion.
In the hospital where she was admitted, tests showed a positive result. However, Mary did not show any signs of ill health, and at that time no one knew that it was possible to be a healthy carrier of typhus. While the trial lasted, they continued to take tests from her - and out of 163 samples, only 120 were positive. No one had ever seen this: the disease seemed to "wake up", then "fall asleep", but the patient did not feel any discomfort. Doctors found a large accumulation of bacteria in her gallbladder and suggested removing this organ, but the woman flatly refused. During her detention, Mary sent another stool sample to a private, independent laboratory, where it was confirmed that she was healthy.
Mary Mallon took this argument into service and constantly resented her forced isolation on North Brother Island, assuring that she was healthy and that keeping an innocent person in prison was cruel and unchristian. The replaced head of the Department of Health heard her pleas and let her go to all four sides, forcing her to swear that she would never work as a cook.
A poster dedicated to Typhoid Mary. To reduce the risk of infection, he calls for thermally treating food / Wikimedia commons
Mallon was released and became a laundress. But this position was paid much less. After several years of struggling with poverty and temptation, the Irish woman gave up, changed her name to Mary Brown and returned to her usual activities. And everywhere her path was marked by new outbreaks of typhus. True, now she changed jobs as often as possible so that Soper could no longer attack her trail.
It is unclear what she was thinking when she got a job as a cook in a local women's hospital in 1915. When 25 people fell ill there, and two patients died, it was no longer possible to hide.
Back at a cottage on a secluded island, Mary Mallon again refused to have her gallbladder removed. She spent the rest of her life - twenty-three years - in quarantine, becoming something of a local celebrity. The journalists interviewed her several times, but they were strictly ordered not to take even a glass of water from her. Six years before her death, she was paralyzed after a stroke, and she died not of typhus, but of pneumonia in 1938.
Her case became the first ever example of a "healthy carrier" of the disease - and only recently, in 2013, scientists began to understand how salmonella of typhoid fever can infect a person, but leave him outwardly healthy. It turned out that the bacterium can hide in one of the types of cells of the immune system, macrophages, affecting the work of the PPAR-delta protein there. With the help of this protein, Salmonella increases the availability of glucose for itself in order to multiply, but not to leave the "hiding place". This mechanism, so far discovered only in mice, could be the cause of all the misadventures of the unfortunate Irish woman and her involuntary victims.