COVID-19 and the Typhoid Mary Parallel

In my apartment, several people who got diagnosed as having Covid-19 were asymptomatic. They only got found because they had to be tested prior to international travel or upon arrival in the state.

 

The most famous asymptomatic carrier (and spreader) of a disease is a cook and housekeeper named Mary Mallon, who became notorious as Typhoid Mary. Bill Bryson’s terrific book, The Body: A Guide for Occupants, tells her story. As an adult, she worked in many well-to-do households of New York City. Wherever she went, two things happened:

“People came down with typhoid and Mary abruptly disappeared.”

 

In 1907, after a particularly bad outbreak, she was tracked down, tested, and found to be infectious but without symptoms – the first asymptomatic carrier. Well, earlier ones were probably burnt as witches.

 

Typhoid Mary was held in protective custody for 3 years, against her will. She was released on promising never to take a job handling food. Upon which, she immediately started working in kitchens again. Always on the move after every new round of infections started in her vicinity, she was finally captured in 1915 and spent the rest of her life under house arrest.

 

The tragedy of Mallon is that a lot of the damage she inflicted was avoidable, had she only washed her hands (before handling food). Sadly, far too many people don’t do that even today during the Covid-19 epidemic…

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more