By August 1906, Mallon had moved to another residence, this time in Long Island's Oyster Bay, where a rich banker, Charles Henry Warren, was vacationing with his family. She only resided with the family over the summer. By September, more than half of the family had developed typhoid fever.

This situation was alarming on multiple levels. The landlord who owned the Warrens' vacation home took matters into his own hands, hiring a series of experts to investigate the situation and hopefully figure out the cause of the infection. One of these experts was George Sober, a sanitary engineer with a penchant for solving particularly nefarious cases with bacterial spread and infection. Sober examined the pipes, faucets, toilets, and cesspool, taking samples, all of which showed negative results for typhoid.

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Thanks to the frustrating nature of the virus, Sober soon turned his attention to the belief that the family may have contracted typhoid from freshwater clams. It wasn’t until Sober interrogated the sick as well as the hired staff that Sober eventually found a correlation. All signs pointed to Mary. The clams weren’t the cause, because of those that had eaten them, some never developed symptoms of typhoid. But Mary… as she traveled from house to house, she continued to host the bacteria, becoming a silent super spreader, among the first identified in recorded history.

The Real Life of Mary Mallon, the Infamous Typhoid Mary

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