I think that one of the main reasons why Typhoid fever was so prevalent in 19th and 20th century NYC was due to the crowded and cramped living quarters, especially in the slums. Back in these days it was very common to not wash your hands, and even washing your hands as we talked about in class is not a sure fire way to avoid typhoid fever. This is because you would have to wash your hands for a ridiculous amount of time to actually clean them well enough. The only way the bacteria could be killed was by cooking it.

The attitudes towards immigrants that lived in the slums or the tenements was not a good one. They were labeled as trash and filthy. This meant that Mary Mallon was treated the same way even though she was a cook, which was considered a very high position of work for an immigrant. They really did not care what happened to her just so long as she stopped infecting the wealthy families that she cooked for.

Back in the days of Mary Mallon the health department was not interested in making sure individual people lived the life they wished. Their argument for isolating Ms. Mallon was that they could not allow her to infect other people and that it was for the greater good of the population. At one point they offered her to send her to Connecticut basically to just get rid of her from NYC and dump her on another state to have to deal with her. Today the strategy for asymptomatic carriers is much better. While they still keep track of known carriers, they are not detained or isolated due to their condition.

The biggest issue that we face today over this type of situation is whether it is justifiable to quarantine somebody. In 2014 during the huge ebola outbreak New York and New Jersey stated that there would be a mandatory quarantine for anyone who had close contact with an ebola victim. The difference between quarantine and isolation, which Typhoid Mary was in, is that isolation is for those who are infected and quarantine is for those suspected. I do not think that it is necessarily justifiable to quarantine people because they were near infected individuals.