Mary Mallon

Mary Mallon was born in 1869 in Cookstown, County Tyrone, in what is now Northern Ireland. From 1900 to 1907, Mallon worked as a cook in the New York City area for eight families, seven of whom contracted typhoid. Mallon again refused to cooperate, believing that typhoid was everywhere and that the outbreaks had happened because of contaminated food and water. Soper notified the New York City Health Department, whose investigators realized that Mallon was a typhoid carrier. After the publication of Soper's article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Mallon attracted extensive media attention and received the nickname "Typhoid Mary". After 2 years and 11 months of Mallon's quarantine, Eugene H. Porter, the New York State Commissioner of Health, decided that disease carriers should no longer be kept in isolation and that Mallon could be freed if she agreed to stop working as a cook and take reasonable steps to avoid transmitting typhoid to others. Mallon's urban legend status in New York inspired the name of the rap group Hail Mary Mallon.