In the early twentieth century, a chef named Mary Malone passed on typhoid infection to dozens of wealthy New Yorkers, after which she spent 25 years in quarantine, but this was not the only reason she remained in quarantine until her death.
Irish chef
Mary Malone was born in Ireland in Tyrone County in 1869, and left her country when she became a teenager in search of a new life in the United States of America.
By 1900, Mary was an immigrant chef working in and around the homes of wealthy families in New York City, and her distinctive dish was said to have been "peach ice cream," according to BBC news.
Between 1900 and 1907 Mary cooked in the homes of seven families, in which each of them a number of individuals suffered a prolonged warming, headache, nausea and diarrhea, and the medical diagnosis was that they had typhoid.
Typhoid .. the disease of the poor
The World Health Organization estimates that between 11 and 20 million people fall ill from typhoid and 128 to 161,000 people die each year.
Salmonella bacteria cause life-threatening typhoid fever, which usually spreads through contaminated food or water and multiplies and spreads in the bloodstream.
Typhoid is usually spread in poor areas that lack safe water sources and adequate sanitation facilities. Back to Mary’s time, the disease was already spreading in New York’s poor neighborhoods, and it was strange at the time that typhoid affected members of the wealthy families who live in high-end neighborhoods, especially that She was healthy and free of symptoms.
"Satisfactory" condemnation and societal stigma
In 1906 a real estate owner in Long Island in New York City hired a researcher named George Sober, to track down the source of the typhoid outbreak, especially since the property owner had rented a bank home and 6 of the 11 residents of the house were infected with typhoid.
According to "National Geographic", Soubar focused his attention on the "chef" who had arrived 3 weeks before the first person was diagnosed.
By combing the list of wealthy New Yorkers whom Mary worked for between 1900 and 1907, he discovered that more than 22 people in those homes had typhoid fever.
About 639 people died of typhoid in poor areas of New York during 1906.
4 months after the start of the investigation, Sobar asked the 37-year-old chef of a sample of urine and faeces to be examined, but she refused and threatened him, and then the police took Mary to the hospital by force and underwent tests, and the result showed positive as a carrier of typhoid salmonella.
Mary was isolated at the North Brother Island isolation facility on the river outside New York, yet she never believed that she was sick, as she believed that she must have symptoms and complain of the disease in order to actually be sick.
Mary was subjected to societal stigma as many of Corona's patients today, and the Americans called her "Mary Typhoid", which made her feel offended and sad.
Mary filed a lawsuit in 1909 against the Ministry of Health in New York City, and spoke about the state's responsibility in the health and autonomy crisis, and that she was imprisoned in the isolation facility without observing the law and unfairly because she is in good health, and was released after one year provided that she stops cooking to protect the society.
Lifetime insulation
Mary Malone worked in laundries but the fee was cheap, so she changed her name to "Mary Brown" and resumed work in kitchens around New York and New Jersey, and prepared meals for the Broadway Hotel and Restaurant and at the Sloan Maternity Hospital that injured 25 people with typhoid in 1915.
Most sources agree that Mary has infected at least 50 people with typhoid, of whom three have died, but the Guardian has confirmed that some estimates number the thousands.
After the outbreaks of injuries - especially in the hospital - George Souber was used again to investigate, and after research, he discovered that Chef Mary Brown was the same as Mary Malone, and she was returned to the isolation facility and held there until she died of a stroke in 1938 after about a quarter of a century of quarantine and permanent denial. On her part, she is a carrier of typhoid.