
Super-Spreader - kmskontorp
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-spreader
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stygiansonic
Also of note: asymptomatic carriers like Typhoid Mary:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Mallon](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Mallon)

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hinkley
I saw a thing about Typhoid Mary a couple years back. I hadn't realized that
she was contagious for most of her life.

She was a cook, and they told her she should never handle food for others
again. They later caught her working with food, and she went (back) into
mandatory quarantine for the last 23 years of her life. She lived to 69,
having spent a little over half of her adult life imprisoned.

They had a theory that removing her gallbladder would cure her, but she
refused.

~~~
bsder
> They had a theory that removing her gallbladder would cure her, but she
> refused.

Um, it's not a theory--it really works most (>90%) of the time. The
gallbladder is generally the site of the chronic salmonella infection that
couldn't be treated before antibiotics.

Now, whether you want to have _surgery_ back in a time before antibiotics is
an independent problem.

~~~
xref
How did they narrow it down to the gallbladder back then?

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bsder
Presumably correlation on soldiers. Medicine was kind of hit or miss back then
but quite often got lots of data from war wounded.

Typhoid had a lot of attention because it tended to be one of those things
that killed a _LOT_ of soldiers. The vaccine for it was developed in 1896 by
the Almroth Edward Wright at the British Army Medical School. And the Second
Boer War was the first time that war casualties were actually larger than
disease casualties because of the vaccine.

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kkotak
Fascinating how these events are traced and studied. Most compelling one for
HIV traced to 1959 in Congo -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_HIV/AIDS#History_of...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_HIV/AIDS#History_of_spread)

