r/science • u/eastbayted • 2d ago

Health Sick food service workers remain top driver of viral foodborne outbreaks in US

https://www.healio.com/news/gastroenterology/20250331/sick-food-service-workers-remain-top-driver-of-viral-foodborne-outbreaks-in-us
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u/TOHSNBN 2d ago edited 1d ago

Typhoid Mary was a cook long before that!

Not trying to argue, i just like history stuff :)

Mary Mallon did not belive that she had Typhoid, most likely because she was asymptomatic. She refused to take even the basic hygene precautions, like washing her hands.
At one point she had herself tested for tyhpoid with negative results by a independent 3rd party because she did not belive the health department.

She insisted to work for "rich people" as a cook because it paid better, she could have had other means of income and had to be forcibly quarantined twice because she refused to stop working as a cook.

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u/guitarburst05 1d ago

Yeah her excuse wasn’t a lack of leave or benefits. Hers was that she was stubborn and dumb.

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u/Excellent_Condition 1d ago

I wonder how much she actually believed she wasn't the reason people got sick. She wasn't particularly educated and germ theory wasn't known, but she would work places, people would get typhoid, then she would leave once the family got sick. This repeated a bunch of times.

If previously healthy people got the same illness after you started working there every place you worked, would you think it was you or something you did?

Then after she was quarantined the first time, she signed an affidavit saying she wouldn't work as a cook. She took a lower paying laundry job, got injured, then went back to working as a cook under a fake name. Every place she worked, people got typhoid and then she left, changing her name and then working as a cook somewhere else.

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u/shit_poster9000 1d ago

To add, the idea of a healthy carrier of disease wasn’t really known or accepted at the time.

Germ theory wasn’t yet fully accepted by the public either, so from Mary’s perspective she’s being unfairly blamed for spreading a disease she isn’t sick with, and doctors are now trying to convince her to let them dig in her guts for her gallbladder (even though they kept changing their minds on which of her innards supposedly housed the infection), an incredibly dangerous surgery at the time (since this predates antibiotics), or be forever barred from the best paying profession available to her.

From Mary’s perspective, she was just a scapegoat. Her treatment during her first quarantine absolutely did not help.