The one person who can take down many

A WOMAN IN SOUTH KOREA INFECTED 37 PEOPLE IN HER CHURCH , ACCORDING TO

NEWS REPORTS

nNEWDELHI: A Super-spreader may sound like someone who is generous in spreading around energy or love, but for experts in infectious diseases, the term means entirely something else and has no positive connotations. A super-spreader is the one person who is responsible for spreading infection among an unusually large number of people. Mary Mallon, known to the world as Typhoid Mary, was a super-spreader of the disease.

Mallon was an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid and is thought to have infected around 50 people, three of whom died of the infection.

She worked as a cook for affluent families in New York. In 1907, a medical researcher identified her as one who may have infected many and caused outbreaks of typhoid. Mallon was forced into quarantine on different occasions for a total of 26 years until she died in 1938.

During the Covid-19 outbreak in India, doctors and researchers will also come across super-spreaders.

In an Elsevier piece in 2010,

Richard A Stein, a scientist from the Department of Molecular Biology, Princeton University, wrote that identifying super-spreaders can give doctors important clues on managing an infectious disease. He cited several examples. In 1960, researchers described some infants as cloud babies who, after catching a respiratory virus, became highly contagious and were able to spread Staphylococcus aureus (a bacterial infection) widely in the nursery. Super-spreaders were also identified during the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (Sars) outbreak.

But a super-spreader gains that distinction based on a combination of factors: immune suppression, delayed diagnosis and quarantine, and misdiagnosis, among others. For example, a Kalyan resident who has tested positive after returning from the US on March 6, is believed to have come in contact with more than 1,000 people. He travelled by train to Sholapur to attend a wedding.

“A super-spreader is basically a person who is capable of infecting several persons. The person may be asymptomatic and hence not in quarantine. The person may not have practised social distancing. We have also seen that those with low immunity transfer more infection. It’s called inoculation,” said Dr BK Tripathi, professor of medicine at Safdarjung Hospital.