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Although Yahoo! doesn't have a category for this unfortunate woman, we found plenty of information about her by using an advanced search technique to filter out web pages about the metal band Typhoid Mary. We typed in the search expression "typhoid mary -band." The "-" in front of a word is used by many search engines to indicate exclusion. By prohibiting the word "band," we eliminated many, though not all, of the matches pertaining to the music group. Then we clicked through a smaller, more focused set of web page results. Mary's life story is impossibly sad and teaches us about the social stigma attached to hapless victims of disease. Mary Mallon was
born in 1870 in County Tyrone, Ireland, and emigrated to the United States at the age of fourteen. She was a notorious typhoid carrier who worked in the New York area as a cook for far too many years. At the time of her death in 1938, she had infected at least fifty-one people with typhoid and caused at least three deaths. Typhoid Fever is a bacterial infection that's spread through contaminated food and water. It causes extreme diarrhea, dehydration, and fever, and can be fatal if not properly treated. Typhoid carriers, such as Mary Mallon, remain immune to the disease but can transmit the Salmonella typhi bacteria easily. The reason for Mary Mallon's infamy was that she kept cooking. She was poor, and probably mentally unstable. She showed up in a vacation home in Long Island, a private residence on Park Avenue, a sanatorium in New Jersey, a maternity hospital in Manhattan. She was relentlessly hounded by the New York City Department of Health and wound up confined to relative isolation in North Brother Island, off the Bronx. She lived alone for 23 years and died of complications following a massive stroke.
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