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Adam Bell

.:The Great pandemic :: The United States in 1918-1919 :. . : The Great Pandemic : : Th... - 1 views

  • The Influenza Pandemic occurred in three waves in the United States throughout 1918 and 1919.
Stefani Hudson

Cholera in the United States | Cholera | CDC - 3 views

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    info on cholera in the united states
Darien Fuller

influenza pandemic of 1918-19 -- Encyclopedia Britannica - 0 views

  • influenza pandemic of 1918–19, also called Spanish influenza pandemic or Spanish flu,  the most severe influenza outbreak of the 20th century and, in terms of total numbers of deaths, among the most devastating pandemics in human history.
  • Influenza is caused by a virus that is transmitted from person to person through airborne respiratory secretions. An outbreak can occur if a new strain of influenza virus emerges against which the population has no immunity. The influenza pandemic of 1918–19 resulted from such an occurrence and affected populations throughout the world. An influenza virus called influenza type A subtype H1N1 is now known to have been the cause of the extreme mortality of this pandemic, which resulted in an estimated 25 million deaths, though some researchers have projected that it caused as many as 40–50 million deaths.
  • The pandemic occurred in three waves. The first apparently originated during World War I in Camp Funsto
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  • n, Kansas, U.S., in early March 1918. American troops that arrived in western Europe in April are thought to have brought the virus with them, and by July it had spread to Poland. The first wave of influenza was comparatively mild; however, during the summer a more lethal type of disease was recognized, and this form fully emerged in August 1918. Pneumonia often developed quickly, with death usually coming two days after the first indications of the flu. For example, at Camp Devens, Massachusetts, U.S., six days after the first case of influenza was reported, there were 6,674 cases. The third wave of the pandemic occurred in the following winter, and by the spring the virus had run its course. In the two later waves about half the deaths were among 20- to 40-year-olds, an unusual mortality age pattern for influenza.
  • Outbreaks of the flu occurred in nearly every inhabited part of the world, first in ports, then spreading from city to city along the main transportation routes. India is believed to have suffered at least 12,500,000 deaths during the pandemic, and the disease reached distant islands in the South Pacific, including New Zealand and Samoa. In the United States about 550,000 people died. Altogether an estimated 25,000,000 persons throughout the world perished, most during the brutal second and third waves. Other outbreaks of Spanish influenza occurred in the 1920s, but with declining virulence
Josie Crossland

Typhoid Mary (historical figure) -- Encyclopedia Britannica - 0 views

  • Typhoid Mary, byname of Mary Mallon   (born September 23, 1869, Cookstown, County Tyrone, Ireland—died November 11, 1938, North Brother Island, Bronx, New York,
  • Mary immigrated to the United States in 1883
Trinity Oslin

Influenza in 1918: An Epidemic in Images - 1 views

  • In army camps and cantonments, in hospitals, and in streets and workplaces across the nation, photographers aimed their lenses and captured a nation struggling to deal with the crisis.
  • In the fall of 1918, against the tragic backdrop of war and disease,
  • That said, even a small sample of America and Americans in the midst of the great influenza pandemic of 1918 is a powerful message indeed.
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  • Some four million men were mobilized in the U.S. Armed Forces. Training camps and stations were often overcrowded. Soldiers and sailors routinely were packed on to passenger trains and sent to training stations and bases around the nation
  • When influenza struck the United States in the fall of 1918, it almost universally appeared in military populations before hitting civilian communities. Medical officers attempted to contain the epidemic through a host of measures, including nasal-pharyngeal sprays for all troops, quarantine of new arrivals, and isolation of cases in camp hospitals or special emergency
  • As the influenza epidemic raged, scientists and physicians struggled to isolate the causative microbe and to develop an effective vaccine against it.
  • Quacks and naysayers, on the other hand, advocated a host of alternatives such as raw onions rubbed on the chest, creosote baths, and the consumption of large quantities of brown sugar. Some—including several city health officers—claimed that a clean heart, clean bowels, or warm feet were all that was needed to stave off influenza.
  • Health officers, mayors, and city councils ordered theaters, movie houses, dance halls, saloons, schools, churches, and other places of public gathering to close for the duration of the epidemic.
  • In the three decades after 1890, nearly 24 million immigrants arrived on the shores of the United States
  • Seattle saw a drastic drop-off in the number of marriage license applications during the epidemic (although, interestingly, the number of divorce filings increased).5
  • World War I did not just affect soldiers, sailors, and Marines. On the home front, civilians were expected to contribute to the war effort as well by self-rationing food, fabric, gasoline, and other goods, and by purchasing Liberty bonds.
  • people in close proximity to one another. In the East, where the deadly fall wave
  • American Red Cross, the Visiting Nurse Association, the Blue Circle Nurses, the Public Health Nurses, and others played a vital role during the influenza epidemic, providing nursing care to the ill, staffing emergency hospitals, organizing volunteers, coordinating relief efforts, assembling gauze face masks, and operating ambulances. Communities across the nation were overwhelmed by the
  • magnitude of the crisis,
  • Local courts, on the other hand, had more flexibility in how they met the crisis
  • The 1918 influenza pandemic took a horrible toll of death and destruction in the United States
Darien Fuller

Flu Facts - INFLUENZA 1918-1919 - 2 views

  • Characteristics 1) Start Suddenly 2) Spread Rapidly 3) People of all ages are affected4) Many people become ill5) The attack rate and death rate is high
    • Darien Fuller
       
      what to look for the influenza
  • The 1918 Influenza causes twenty to forty million deaths worldwide. More than one half of the casualties from World War I were from the flu.The Flu infected 25% of United States troops during the war killing more than one million men, according to War Department records. The Flu caused 500,000 deaths in the United States. In the States alone, 25 million people became ill. Twenty Four out of Thirty Six military camps in the United States experienced an influenza outbreak. Thirty of the Fifty largest cities suffered from an "excess mortality" from the influenza
  • This flu virus had a high attack and mortality rate among young adults ages twenty to fifty and created a "W" shaped mortality curve as the youngest and eldest portions of the populations were at the extremes and young adults were the bulk of those infected. One of the major concerns with this strain of the influenza virus was that it caused pneumonia. The body's defenses are severely weakened which makes bacteria easier to invade and cause secondary complications.   
michael huddleston

CDC - Typhoid Fever: General Information - NCZVED - 0 views

  • Typhoid fever is common in most parts of the world except in industrialized regions such as the United States, Canada, western Europe, Australia, and Japan.
  • herefore, if you are traveling to the developing world, you should consider taking precautions. Over the past 10 years, travelers from the United States to Asia, Africa, and Latin America have been especially at risk.
  • Two basic actions can protect you from typhoid fever: Avoid risky foods and drinks. Get vaccinated against typhoid fever.
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  • Salmonella Typhi lives only in humans.
  • eat food or drink beverages that have been handled by a person who is shedding Salmonella
  • If you drink water, buy it bottled or bring it to a rolling boil for 1 minute before you drink it. Bottled carbonated water is safer than uncarbonated water. Ask for drinks without ice unless the ice is made from bottled or boiled water. Avoid popsicles and flavored ices that may have been made with contaminated water. Eat foods that have been thoroughly cooked and that are still hot and steaming. Avoid raw vegetables and fruits that cannot be peeled. Vegetables like lettuce are easily contaminated and are very hard to wash well. When you eat raw fruit or vegetables that can be peeled, peel them yourself. (Wash your hands with soap first.) Do not eat the peelings. Avoid foods and beverages from street vendors. It is difficult for food to be kept clean on the street, and many travelers get sick from food bought from street vendors.
  • If you are traveling to a country where typhoid is common, you should consider being vaccinated against typhoid. Visit a doctor or travel clinic to discuss your vaccination options. Remember that you will need to complete your vaccination at least 1-2 weeks (dependent upon vaccine type) before you travel so that the vaccine has time to take effect. Typhoid vaccines lose effectiveness after several years; if you were vaccinated in the past, check with your doctor to see if it is time for a booster vaccination. Taking antibiotics will not prevent typhoid fever; they only help treat it. The chart below provides basic information on typhoid vaccines that are available in the United States.
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    where you can get typhoid fever and avoid it.
a-a-ron butler

Epidemics of the Past: Bubonic Plague | FactMonster.com - 1 views

  • Ring around the rosy, A pocket full of posies, Ashes … ashes, We all fall down.
  • A familiar nursery rhyme that children have recited as a harmless play song for generations
  • ironically refers to one of Europe's most devastating diseases. The bubonic plague, better known as the “The Black Death,” has existed for thousands of years. The first recorded case of the plague was in China in 224 B.C.E. But the most significant outbreak was in Europe in the mid-fourteenth century. Over a five-year period from 1347 to 1352, 25 million people died. One-third to one-half of the European population was wiped out!
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  • infection: fever, headache, and a general feeling of weakness, followed by aches in the upper leg and groin, a white tongue, rapid pulse, slurred speech, confusion, and fatigue
  • first symptoms
  • painful swelling of the lymph glands in the neck, armpits, and groin occurred, and these enlarged areas were called “buboes.” Bleeding under the skin followed, causing purplish blotches. Dark-ringed red spots on the skin from infected fleabites, or “ring around the rosy,” eventually turned black, producing putrid-smelling lesions
  • nervous system collapsed, causing extreme pain and bizarre neurological disorders
  • inspiration for “Dance of Death” rituals
  • skin blackene
  • the skin blackened, giving rise to “The Black Death.
  • “pocket full of posies,” that people carried with them and held near their faces to ward off the horrid odor
  • uncharacteristically cremated—the “ashes, ashes,”—and finally, death would come, and we would “all fall down.”
  • Fleas feeding on infected rodents can transmit the disease to people as well
  • Once infected, people can infect others by coughing, sneezing, or close talking
  • The origin of “The Black Death” dates to an outbreak in China during the 1330s
  • Unlike smallpox, the plague is still a threat in some parts of the world. Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes bubonic plague, is transmitted through rat-tainted fleabites in densely populated cities and in countries with poor hygiene, or in the open country from infected wild rodents. The most common form of human plague is a swollen and painful lymph gland that forms buboes.
  • Plague vaccines have been used since the late nineteenth century, but their effectiveness is uncertain. Vaccination reduces the incidence and severity of disease resulting from the bite of infected fleas, but it isn't 100 percent effective. The plague vaccine is licensed for use in the United States and is available for adults at high risk—people who live in the western United States, people who will be in parts of the world where plague is still endemic, and people who are around rodents. Severe inflammatory reactions are common, and plague vaccine should not be given to anyone with a known hypersensitivity to beef protein, soya, casein, or phenol. Finally, the vaccination routine is complex and requires frequent boosters to maintain its effectiveness.
  • Pneumonic plague is more difficult to treat, and even with antibiotics, victims can die from it. Pneumonic plague occurs when the infectious bacteria infects the lungs. The first signs of illness in pneumonic plague are fever, headache, weakness, and a cough that produces blood or watery sputum. The pneumonia progresses over two to four days and, without early treatment, death ensues.
  • Bubonic Plague
Dusty Soles

Typhoid Mary -- Britannica School - 3 views

  • (1869–1938). Mary Mallon, who came to be better known as Typhoid Mary, was a famous typhoid carrier in the New York City area early in the 20th century. Dozens of original cases of typhoid were directly attributed to her and countless more were indirectly attributed, though she herself was immune to typhoid bacillus (Salmonella typhi).
    • Josie Crossland
       
      This gives you pretty much all the information you need.
    • Dusty Soles
       
      I know right thanks josie
  • Mary was born Sept. 23, 1869, in Cookstown, County Tyrone, Ireland. She immigrated to the United States in 1883 and subsequently made her living as a domestic servant, most often as a cook. It is not clear when she became a carrier of the typhoid bacterium. However, from 1900 to 1907 nearly two dozen people fell ill with typhoid fever in households in New York City and Long Island where Mary worked. The illnesses often occurred shortly after Mary began working in each household, but, by the time the disease was traced to its source in a household where she had recently been employed, Mary had disappeared.
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  • Mary continued to work as a cook,
  • outbreak likely was caused by contaminated wate
  • until 1907
  • outbreak in the Manhattan household that involved a death from the disease, Soper met with Mary. He subsequently linked all 22 cases of typhoid fever that had been recorded in New York City and the Long Island area to Mary.
  • Again Mary fled
  • Four years later Soper began looking for Mary again when an epidemic broke out at a sanatorium in Newfoundland, N.J., and at Sloane Maternity Hospital in Manhattan, N.Y.; Mary had worked as a cook at both places. She was at last found in a suburban home in Westchester county, New York, and was returned to North Brother Island, where she remained the rest of her life. A paralytic stroke in 1932 led to her slow death six years later on Nov. 11, 1938.
  • Mary claimed to have been born in the United States, but it was later determined that she was an immigrant. Fifty-one original cases of typhoid and three deaths were directly attributed to her.
    • eeemmmiillyy
       
      Wow. very useful
  • In 1906
Madison Groves

Yellow fever breaks out in Philadelphia - History.com This Day in History - 10/11/1793 - 1 views

  • The death toll from a yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia hits 100 on this day in 1793. By the time it ended, 5,000 people were dead. Yellow fever, or American plague as it was known at the time, is a viral disease that begins with fever and muscle pain. Next, victims often become jaundiced (hence, the term "yellow" fever), as their liver and kidneys cease to function normally. Some of the afflicted then suffer even worse symptoms. Famous early American Cotton Mather described it as "turning yellow then vomiting and bleeding every way." Internal bleeding in the digestive tract causes bloody vomit. Many victims become delirious before dying. The virus, like malaria, is carried and transferred by mosquitoes. The first yellow fever outbreaks in the United States occurred in late 1690s. Nearly 100 years later, in the late summer of 1793, refugees from a yellow fever epidemic in the Caribbean fled to Philadelphia. Within weeks, people throughout the city were experiencing symptoms. By the middle of October, 100 people were dying from the virus every day. Caring for the victims so strained public services that the local city government collapsed. Philadelphia was also the seat of the United States government at the time, but federal authorities simply evacuated the city in face of the raging epidemic. Eventually, a cold front eliminated Philadelphia's mosquito population and the death toll fell to 20 per day by October 26. Today, a vaccine prevents yellow fever in much of the world, though 20,000 people still die every year from the disease.
jaxson dillard

Yellow Fever Disease Profile - 0 views

  • Yellow fever and the yellowfever mosquito are thought to have originated in Africa. It was brought to the New World on slave ships in the 1500s. Yellow fever ravaged Europeans in the New World. Buckley (1985) stated, "The West Indies was, quite simply, a deathtrap for whites without immunity to yellow fever." The British were repeatedly stung by the disease in the Caribbean and South America. In 1741, during an expedition to capture Peru and Mexico, British forces were reduced from 27,000 to 7,000 by the dreaded disease they called "black vomit." Coastal towns and hamlets in the United States were particularly vulnerable to the disease in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Even as late as 1878, a yellow fever epidemic struck more than 100 United States towns, killing at least 20,000 people.
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    Good Facts
jace givens

Down Syndrome Facts - National Down Syndrome Society - 0 views

  • Down syndrome occurs when an individual has a full or partial extra copy of chromosome 21. This additional genetic material alters the course of development and causes the characteristics associated with Down syndrome. There are three types of Down syndrome: trisomy 21 (nondisjunction) accounts for 95% of cases, translocation accounts for about 4% and mosaicism accounts for about 1%.    Down syndrome is the most commonly occurring chromosomal condition. One in every 691 babies in the United States is born with Down syndrome. There are more than 400,000 people living with Down syndrome in the United States. Down syndrome occurs in people of all races and economic levels.
  • Down syndrome occurs when an individual has a full or partial extra copy of chromosome 21. This additional genetic material alters the course of development and causes the characteristics associated with Down syndrome.
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    There are three types of Down syndrome: trisomy 21 (nondisjunction) accounts for 95% of cases, translocation accounts for about 4% and mosaicism accounts for about 1%.   
Dusty Soles

CDC - Typhoid Fever: Technical Information - NCZVED - 5 views

  • In the United States, an estimated 5,700 cases of typhoid fever occur annually, mostly among travelers. An estimated 21 million cases of typhoid fever and 200,000 deaths occur worldwide.
Bethany Carter

Open Collections Program: Contagion, The Yellow Fever Epidemic in Philadelphia, 1793 - 1 views

  • Yellow fever is known for bringing on a characteristic yellow tinge to the eyes and skin, and for the terrible “black vomit” caused by bleeding into the stomach. Known today to be spread by infected mosquitoes, yellow fever was long believed to be a miasmatic disease originating in rotting vegetable matter and other putrefying filth, and most believed the fever to be contagious.
    • Caden Lewis
       
      Good Information for History of Yellow Fever.
  • The Yellow Fever Epidemic in Philadelphia, 1793
  • The first major American yellow fever epidemic hit Philadelphia in July 1793 and peaked during the first weeks of October.
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  • As the population fled or died, few were left to attend to nursing and burying duties. Rush, who believed that blacks were immune to yellow fever, asked members of the African Society to come forward and care for to the sick and the dead. Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, two free black men, volunteered. In a few weeks Jones, Allen and others were bleeding hundreds of people a day under Rush’s direction, as well as nursing patients and carrying coffins.
  • Their efforts, though praised by Rush, were scorned by the white public as being profiteering and extortionist. In response, Jones and Allen published their own description of their experiences.
  • About two months into the epidemic, however, Rush was proven wrong and blacks began to fall ill, dying from yellow fever at about the same rate as whites.
  • The Bush Hill Hospital, which housed the sick poor, was desperately understaffed. When Philadelphia’s mayor asked the public for help, a French-born merchant from Santo Domingo named Stephen Girard stepped up and recommended his compatriot, Dr. Jean Devèze, to head the hospital. Devèze refused to believe that yellow fever was contagious and he disapproved of Rush’s aggressive treatments. Devèze later became a world authority on yellow fever.
  • The first major American yellow fever epidemic hit Philadelphia in July 1793 and peaked during the first weeks of October. Philadelphia, then the nation’s capital, was the most cosmopolitan city in the United States. Two thousand free blacks lived there, as well as many recent white French-speaking arrivals from the colony of Santo Domingo, who were fleeing from a slave rebellion. Major Revolutionary political figures lived there, and in the first week of September, Thomas Jefferson wrote to James Madison that everyone who could escape the city was doing so. The epidemic depopulated Philadelphia: 5,000 out of a population of 45,000 died, and chronicler Mathew Carey estimated that another 17,000 fled.
    • Bethany Carter
       
      Yellow Fever Epidemic, 1793
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    good website for yellow fever 
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    the first epidemic in the USA 1793.
Jacob Morrison

Plague, Plague Information, Black Death Facts, News, Photos -- National Geographic - 2 views

  • Plague is a bacterial infection found mainly in rodents and their fleas. But via those fleas it can sometimes leap to humans. When it does, the outcome can be horrific, making plague outbreaks the most notorious disease episodes in history.Most infamous of all was the Black Death, a medieval pandemic that swept through Asia and Europe. It reached Europe in the late 1340s, killing an estimated 25 million people. The Black Death lingered on for centuries, particularly in cities. Outbreaks included the Great Plague of London (1665-66), in which one in five residents died.
  • Plague is a bacterial infection found mainly in ro
  • Death
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  • Bubonic plague, the disease's most common form, refers to telltale buboes—painfully swollen lymph nodes—that appear around the groin, armpit, or neck. Septicemic plague, which spreads in the bloodstream, comes either via fleas or from contact with plague-infected body matter. Pneumonic plague, the most infectious type, is an advanced stage of bubonic plague when the disease starts being passed directly, person to person, through airborne droplets coughed from the lungs. If left untreated, bubonic plague kills about 50 percent of those it infects. The other two forms are almost invariably fatal without antibiotics.Yersinia pestis is extraordinarily virulent, even when compared with closely related bacteria. This is because it's a mutant variety, handicapped both by not being able to survive outside the animals it infects and by an inability to penetrate and hide in its host's body cells. To compensate, Y. pestis needs strength in numbers and the ability to disable its victim's immune system. It does this by injecting toxins into defense cells such as macrophages that are tasked with detecting bacterial infections. Once these cells are knocked out, the bacteria can multiply unhindered.Victims are so overwhelmed that they're more or less poisoned to death as the bacilli gather in thick clots under the skin, where a passing flea might pick them up. Other grim side effects can include gangrene, erupting pus-filled glands, and lungs that literally dissolve.
  • Plague still exists in various parts of the world. In 2003, more than 2,100 human cases and 180 deaths were recorded, nearly all of them in Africa. The last reported serious outbreak was in 2006 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in Central Africa, when at least 50 people died. The United States, China, India, Vietnam, and Mongolia are among the other countries that have confirmed human plague cases in recent years.Most people survive if they're given the correct antibiotics in time. Good sanitation and pest control help prevent plague outbreaks since they need crowded, dirty, rat-infested conditions to really get going.There are fears that plague bacteria possibly could be used for a bioterror attack if released in aerosol form.
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    national geographic what the plague is
Josie Crossland

Typhoid Mary - The Sad Story of Typhoid Mary - 7 views

  • In March 1907, Soper found Mallon working as a cook in the home of Walter Bowen and his family.
    • Josie Crossland
       
      This information is very helpful!
    • Dusty Soles
       
      it is
  • Mary Mallon, now known as Typhoid Mary, seemed a healthy woman when a health inspector knocked on her door in 1907, yet she was the cause of several typhoid outbreaks. Since Mary was the first "healthy carrier" of typhoid fever in the United States, she did not understand how someone not sick could spread disease -- so she tried to fight back.
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  • footprints were spotted leading from the house to a chair placed next to a fence. Over the fence was a neighbor's property. They spent five hours searching both properties, until, finally, they found "a tiny scrap of blue calico caught in the door of the areaway closet under the high outside stairway leading to the front door."4
  • Mary was on the lookout and peered out, a long kitchen fork in her hand like a rapier. As she lunged at me with the fork, I stepped back, recoiled on the policeman and so confused matters that, by the time we got through the door, Mary had disappeared. 'Disappear' is too matter-of-fact a word; she had completely vanished.3
  • Mallon, now extremely suspicious of these health officials, refused to listen to Baker, Baker returned with the aid of five police officers and an ambulance. Mallon was prepared this time. Baker describes the scene:
    • eeemmmiillyy
       
      This has a lot of great information. It is very helpful. 
    • eeemmmiillyy
       
      The story/history of Typhoid Mary
  • After a trial and then a short run from health officials, Typhoid Mary was recaptured and forced to live in relative seclusion upon North Brother Island off New York. Who was Mary Mallon and how did she spread typhoid fever? An Investigation
  • For the summer of 1906, New York banker Charles Henry Warren wanted to take his family on vacation. They rented a summer home from George Thompson and his wife in Oyster Bay, Long Island. Also for the summer, the Warrens hired Marry Mallon to be their cook.
  • On August 27, one of the Warren's daughters became ill with typhoid fever. Soon, Mrs. Warren and two maids became ill; followed by the gardener and another Warren daughter. In total, six of the eleven people in the house came down with typhoid. Since the common way typhoid spread was through water or food sources, the owners of the home feared they would not be able to rent the property again without first discovering the source of the outbreak. The Thompsons first hired investigators to find the cause, but they were unsuccessful. Then the Thompsons hired George Soper, a civil engineer with experience in typhoid fever outbreaks. It was Soper who believed the recently hired cook, Mary Mallon, was the cause. Mallon had left the Warren's approximately three weeks after the outbreak. Soper began to research her employment history for more clues. Mary Mallon was born on September 23, 1869 in Cookstown, Ireland. According to what she told friends, Mallon emigrated to America around the age of 15. Like most Irish immigrant women, Mallon found a job as a domestic servant. Finding she had a talent for cooking, Mallon became a cook, which paid better wages than many other domestic service positions. Soper was able to trace Mallon's employment history back to 1
  • 900. He found that typhoid outbreaks had followed Mallon from job to job. From 1900 to 1907, Soper found that Mallon had worked at seven jobs in which 22 people had become ill, including one young girl who died, with typhoid fever shortly after Mallon had come to work for them.1 Soper was satisfied that this was much more than a coincidence; yet, he needed stool and blood samples from Mallon to scientifically prove she was the carrier.
Stefani Hudson

Cholera Definition - Diseases and Conditions - Mayo Clinic - 0 views

  • DefinitionBy Mayo Clinic Staff Cholera is a bacterial disease usually spread through contaminated water. Cholera causes severe diarrhea and dehydration. Left untreated, cholera can be fatal in a matter of hours, even in previously healthy people. Modern sewage and water treatment have virtually eliminated cholera in industrialized countries. The last major outbreak in the United States occurred in 1911. But cholera is still present in Africa, Southeast Asia, Haiti and central Mexico. The risk of cholera epidemic is highest when poverty, war or natural disasters force people to live in crowded conditions without adequate sanitation. Cholera is easily treated. Death results from severe dehydration that can be prevented with a simple and inexpensive rehydration solution.
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    The definition of Cholera.
  •  
    here is another pretty good site
andrew avila

Typhus Fever: An Overlooked Diagnosis - 0 views

    • andrew avila
       
      history of typhoid
  • On admission, the patient was alert and oriented with high fever (40 °C); no pallor, jaundic
  • In February 2008, a previously-healthy 20-year old adult labourer with complaints of acute watery
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  • Hospital of ICDDR,B. He received unspecified medicines at home. No significant past illness was reported.
  • diarrhoea and high continued fever for five days was admitted to the Longer Stay Unit of the Dhaka
  • After 24 hours, the patient was found to be toxic, highly febrile, and developed conjunctival injection (subconjunctival haemorrhage) (Fig.). So, a differential of dengue and typhus fever was considered.
  • Laboratory investigation showed that total white blood-cell count (TWBC) was 3,000/mm3 with polymorphs–80%, band–4%, lymp–14%, and monocyte–2%.
  • Random blood glucose on admission was 9.0 mmol/L. Complete blood count, blood for culture, and rectal swab for culture were requested, and intravenous (IV) ceftriaxone was started.
  • His problems were listed as: (a) acute watery diarrhoea and (b) fever.Clinical impression was enteric fever with a differential of viral fever
  • On examination, his breath sounds were vesicular, with no added sounds. Abdomen was soft and non-tender, and bowel sounds were active. Liver and spleen were not palpable. Other systemic examination revealed no abnormality
  • cyanosis was noted. His radial pulse was 120 bpm, regular and good in volume; respiration rate was 24 per minute; and BP was 100/50 mm Hg.
Trinity Oslin

Fighting Influenza . : The Great Pandemic : : The United States in 1918-1919 : . - 2 views

  • that diseases are caused by microorganisms.
  • Building on this new understanding of disease, scientists and physicians achieved incredible successes, identifying fifty causative agents of diseases ranging from typhoid, tuberculosis, cholera, plague and malaria between 1880 and 1920.
    • Trinity Oslin
       
      what causes the influenza and the sympyoms
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  • scientists mistakenly believed that influenza was caused by a bacteria. not a virus. Called Pfeiffer’s bacillus, this bacteria had been first identified as the cause of influenza
  • bacillus also failed to cause influenza.
  • Early symptoms of the disease now included a temperature in the range of 102 to 104 degrees.
  • sore throat, exhaustion, headache, aching limbs, bloodshot eyes, a cough and occasionally a violent nosebleed.
  • digestive symptoms such as vomiting or diarrhea.
  • As a viral infection, influenza can be prevented by a vaccine and during the early weeks of the pandemic,
  • itizens wear gauze masks. Unfortunately, while masks are highly effective at preventing diseases which are caused by bacteria , they are less effective in providing protection against viral diseases
Josie Crossland

Typhoid Mary - 0 views

  • IT WAS AUGUST 27, 1906, when at the rented summer home of Charles Henry Warren and family in Oyster Bay, Long Island, the Warrens' young daughter became ill with what was diagnosed as typhoid fever. The same week, five more persons began showing symptoms: Mrs. Warren, a second daughter, two maids, and the gardener. The relatively affluent town of Oyster Bay had never had an outbreak of typhoid before. A popular vacation spot for wealthy urban New Yorkers, it was best known for hosting President Theodore Roosevelt during the summer. The house the Warrens had taken for the season stood on high ground, overlooking the bay, and the circumstances of its occupants were impeccable — a wealthy banker, his family and their servants, living in fairly luxurious style.
  •     The Warren family were not the type of people thought likely to contract typhoid — an illness widely associated with poverty and filth. Charles Warren was the president of the Lincoln Bank. They were the sort of folks who could afford to rent a nice big summer home on affluent Long Island (as well as hire a cook, servants, and gardener to keep things tidy). Rich people just didn't get typhoid — especially in Oyster Bay — and predictably, there was concern in the area that the town would become a less desirabl
  • e resort should it be seen as teeming with the disease.
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  •     George Thompson, the owner of the house, was particularly worried, concerned that no well-to-do New Yorkers would be of a mind to rent his home the following season if it was associated with disease. The house was very large, and expensive to run. Thompson himself, though the owner of four other homes, could not afford to live there. If the house lay vacant, it would mean disaster. Desperate, he called in experts to track down the source of the contagion, hoping it came from outside the property and eager for someone to prove it.     Drinking water was analyzed. The single indoor toilet, the cesspool, manure pit, and outhouse were all examined and ultimately rejected as the possible source of infection.
  •     Dairy products were inspected.     An old woman who lived on the beach was considered a likely suspect. She had offered the family clams for sale, and these were scrutinized minutely, but no one else in th
  • e town who had eaten shellfish from the same source had fallen ill.
  •     Thompson, unsatisfied with the inconclusive results from local health authorities on the scene and from his hired experts, reached out to friends in New York City, looking for someone, anyone, to help him with his embarrassing problem.     Salvation didn't exactly ride in on a white horse. Nor was Dr. George Soper hero material exactly. Dr. Soper was not even in fact a medical doctor. He was a sanitary engineer — as one newspaper described him: `a doctor to sick cities.'     Called into the fray, he took the train out to Oyster Bay from the city and set immediately to work. After reviewing the findings of the first medical men on the scene, as well as those of earlier experts who had scrutinized the drinking water, trash and sewage, he began questioning members of the household, inquiring about visitors, ultimately receiving a comprehensive list going back an impressive ten years. To the best of his ability, Soper examined the medical histories of each of these individuals, eventually ruling all of them out as possible sources.
  •     Soper now uncovered `other episodes', as he called them. Provocatively, there was a two-year period for which there were no records available at all for Ms. Mallon's employment — the period between the Gilsey family incident and Mary's arrival in Oyster Bay.     The two-year blank was tantalizing to Soper. Where had Mary been? Who had she been cooking for? She must have been cooking somewhere ... The sanitary engineer's mind teemed with disturbing images. He no doubt pictured the cook stirring soup in some unknown and very busy cellar kitchen, barehanded, unknowing, infecting untold multitudes of solid citizens with potentially deadly bacilli.     Dr. Soper's breathless, self-serving, yet ultimately unreliable accounts to newspapers give a sense of how excited he was, how exhilarated by the thrill of the chase and the tantalizing prospect of being onto something really important. At first he had anticipated a case that might last only a few weeks — a little sea air, a few bowls of steamers, some resolution, and back to the city — but now he found himself further drawn into a quest which had already occupied him for a full four months. The Warrens were long gone — back home with the other summer renters. The weather had turned colder, the house now stood empty.
  •     He went over the facts of the case as they had presented themselves to him. Here he had an unexplained outbreak of typhoid in an area where no typhoid of any kind had been previously. The home was immaculate, clean from top to bottom. All other possible sources of infection had been examined and ruled out. The only new element introduced into the household had been a cook. The cook handled food, which all the afflicted members of the household had eaten. The disease broke out, and the cook was now gone. Had she left under different circumstances, say, the disappearance of a diamond necklace, the cops — or any investigator — would have been looking very hard in her direction.     Soper got a description of the suspect: a woman of about forty, tall, with a buxom build, blond hair, blue eyes, and a firm mouth and jaw. It was remarked that she was `a pretty good cook', though she was observed by some interviewees in retrospect as bein
  • `not particularly clean' in her work habits and `difficult to talk to'.     Writing later, Soper describes what he did next:
  •     This was frustrating. Things usually went pretty quickly in cases like this. Feces in the water supply, contaminated milk, a sickly visitor, and case closed. Not so at the Thompson house. Soper began to `walk the cat backward' in search of an answer.     Typhoid's incubation period was known to be ten to fourteen days long, so he focused on a time on or before August 20. Soper was intrigued by the news that on the fourth of the month, the Warrens had seen fit to change cooks. More significantly, the new cook, a Mary Mallon, was now missing, having left without notice or explanation some three weeks after the sickness began.     A missing cook! It was the kind of lead that criminal investigators find almost too easy, too good to be true; evidence of a kind that prosecutors like to present to jurors as indicating `guilty knowledge', the kind of red flag that Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot would disregard automatically as being just too obvious. Look at it: A murder or some other felony is committed in a household or place of business, and someone who used to be there is suddenly no longer there. It doesn't take an investigative mastermind to deduce who to go looking for first. It was circumstantial evidence of the most provocative kind, and Soper was well acquainted with the old saw about circumstantial evidence: `It's like finding a goldfish in your milk. It doesn't prove anything — but it's mighty suspicious'.
  •     Carriers were a very hot concept in the new world of epidemiology, a theory unproven in the United States. In Germany, however, the respected bacteriologist Dr. Robert Koch had recently investigated repeated outbreaks of typhoid in a Strasbourg bakeshop. The bakery was clean. The water supply was uncorrupted. Yet well-heeled customers were getting sick. Dr. Koch questioned the proprietor and found that she had, years earlier, contracted typhoid, but had survived the experience and was now, seemingly, fully recovered. After testing her, Koch found that even though she was devoid of symptoms and to all outward appearances a healthy person capable of working and going about her tasks like everyone else, she was in fact still teeming with typhoid germs, exuding them through her bowel movements and spreading them with improperly cleaned hands. This was a revolutionary discovery, and news of it had found its way to New York, where it was discussed with interest. Soper had read the transcript of a speech Koch had given on the subject a couple of years previous.     Dr. Soper had learned of seemingly clean and affluent homes in Mary Mallon's past being struck with typhoid after her employment. Now he was confronted with similar circumstances in yet another place she had worked. Given that no human carrier such as Koch's bakery proprietor had ever been identified in America, Soper was suddenly very, very interested in getting his hands on the mysterious Mary Mallon.
  •     That she was evidently not interested in being found only piqued the good doctor's interest to even greater pitch:
  •     At this point, Soper already seems to have formed in his mind a picture of Mary as some kind of Moriarty-esque nemesis, an elusive and crafty adversary with the answer to all his questions, but always just out of reach.     He wanted her badly. His day-to-day work, by this time, had become closer to a detective's than a microbe-hunter's, interviewing witnesses, poring over records. He felt good. He was going to make his bones with this case. He foresaw himself as the poster boy for epidemiologists and health professionals, an honored and much-sought-after speaker at all the medical societies, a hero to the afflicted, a newspaper personality, idol to generations of aspiring sanitary engineers.     Furthermore, he knew that his work was important. Typhoid was lethal and, especially in 1906 and 1907, no joke.
  •     These were boom times. It was a new century and a new world that Soper lived in. The 1900 Chicago World's Fair had once and for all convinced Americans that they lived in a great country, a major world power, on a par — at least — with the European monarchies. Any inferiority complex New Yorkers and Americans might once have felt was rapidly disappearing in the light of an increasingly powerful, worldwide naval presence, a national construction explosion, the emergence of a newly affluent and pleasure-seeking middle class, the recent developments of subway systems, mass-produced automobiles, a tunnel under the Hudson River, new entertainments, libraries, an exuberantly sensationalistic press, and the warm glow of having recently drubbed the Spanish in Cuba and the Philippines. Great strides had been made in the fighting of disease and the word `epidemic' was now an embarrassment to a city. An earlier epidemic of typhoid and cholera had had New York and Philadelphia pointing fingers at one another, each claiming the other was responsible for the outbreak, both mortified that something so closely associated with the squalor of the old world would be blamed on their fair metropolis.     Soper's description of an earlier experience with a typhoid epidemic gives a flavor of what a man in his position saw as his responsibility, of what he perceived himself to be up against:
  • These were the stakes as Soper saw them. Confusion, suspicion, contagion, neighbor pitted against neighbor, panic in the streets, and ultimately, chaos and death.     Epidemics — especially unexplained ones — tended to bring out the worst in people, and the `carrier' theory, however fearful its implications, was far preferable to some of the alternatives. In the past citizens thought to be contagious — particularly if they were members of the minority or underclass — had hardly been taken to the bosom of their communities. Instead the usual outcome was for mob rule to win out. It was not unheard of for those thought to be infected to be run out of town on a rail or set adrift in the Long Island Sound — often at the point of a gun — or worse still. As Soper saw it, he needed a quick and tidy solution to the Oyster Bay problem.     Looking at pictures of Soper — a serious, narrow-faced, whippetlike man with a neat mustache and a receding hairline — one gets the impression of not so much the dogged detective he might have liked to see himself as, but of a timid, fastidious scientist, a man ensconced in reasoned practice and methodology. That he might have been racist, sexist, and far too influenced by the prejudices of his class — as has been suggested by revisionist accounts — a flawed, ambitious fellow who looked for the first likely Irish woman he could clap the manacles on — does not present itself through photography. Nor do we get much of that from his work later in life: tomes with titles such as: The Air and Ventilation of Subways (1908), Modern Methods of Street Cleaning
  • (1909), Further Studies of European Methods of Street Cleaning and Waste Disposal With Suggestions (1930), and of course, what proved his masterwork, the story for which he became best known, the pamphlet with a title like a Victorian detective story's The Curious Case of Typhoid Mary (1939).     George Soper looks from his photographs not to be a nice guy. He looks like someone who was bullied in high school, a nerd, a geek, an apple-polishing dirt-wonk with an unseemly interest in filth and how to make it go away.     It was not for a good many more months, not until March of 1907, that Soper finally came face to face with Mary Mallon. It was then that reports reached him that a family on Park Avenue in New York City had been stricken with typhoid. Two cases had initially been reported. A maid was ill, and a daughter of the people who owned the house, a beautiful young woman in her twenties, was lying on her deathbed. The family were reportedly beside themselves with grief. The girl died two days later, and soon the nurse who had attended her became str
  • icken as well.     The details of the case as they reached Soper were indeed tragic, another example of bad things happening to people to whom bad things are not supposed to happen; but what particularly excited Soper, got that Sherlock Holmes mojo working again, was the news that there was a new cook fitting the description of Mary Mallon still employed by the stricken family.
  •     The cook in question, and indeed it was Mary Mallon, did not quite share the good doctor's enthusiasm. She showed true displeasure when Soper, who rushed over to the Park Avenue address immediately upon receiving the news, suddenly showed up at her job, accusing her in no uncertain terms of causing the typhoid which right then was draining the life from one member of her employer's family.
  •     To his dismay, Mary did not see Soper as the answer to some long-troubling question about the series of odd and unpleasant coincidences that had long followed her. He stood an accuser, and she reacted thus, and her reaction seems to have come as a complete surprise to him.     Here, at this first meeting between pursuer and pursued, is where things began to go terribly wrong — at least for Mary Mallon and any future she might have had. What was said here, and how it was said, would set the tone for everything that happened after.
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