George Soper finally managed to track the cook down after much searching to a house on Park Avenue where she was working again as a cook. Most of the food eaten at Oyster Bay had been thoroughly cooked, therefore destroying any probable bacteria, however there was a particular dessert “ of which everyone present was particularly fond”, it was “ ice-cream with fresh peaches cut up and frozen in it” yet George concluded that it wasn’t just fresh peaches that had been added to the ice-cream! George was also able to pinpoint the likely moment when people were infected by taking a detailed dietary history. She was described as “ an Irish woman about 40 years of age, tall, heavy, single” and she was apparently in good health. The only thing George could find was that the family had changed their cook of many years to a new cook who had joined the household three weeks before the outbreak occurred but that she had left 3 weeks after it occurred. The more he looked into the outbreak George became convinced that something had occurred in or around the 20th August that had exposed the family to the infection. George then looked at vegetables and fruit, picnics and holidays, social standing and even whether there had been previous outbreaks in the house… nothing! Eventually George discovered that no clams had actually been eaten since the middle of July, so he rejected that theory. This theory was reinforced by George’s own observations that clams were often sourced locally from a site close to where sewerage was dumped into the sea. Unfortunately, our hero George then got led (literally) down the garden path when local people kept telling him the affected family were very fond of eating clams. In fact he even looked for “ the possibility that the typhoidal germs might have percolated through the ground to the well from some receptacle of excrement”!ĭespite local people continuing to blame the water supply despite no evidence of this (sound familiar - Covid-19 and research laboratories!) George Soper began to suspect that the “ infectious material had been carried to the house by some person or some article of food”.

The original investigators had blamed the water supply, but George Soper found no evidence that the well, supplying water to the house, had been contaminated. So he was right, why did they get infected in the first place? Our “ hero” George Soper remarks that it doesn’t matter if the people affected were all infected at the same time or if the first person (index case) affected others (secondary cases), he was concerned how “ anyone” was infected in the first place… No one else in Oyster Bay was affected, and in fact typhoid was a rare diagnosis in Oyster Bay.

The first case occurred on the 27th August and the last on the 3rd September. The house in Oyster Bay where the outbreak occurred had been rented for the summer by a New York banker, General William Henry Warren, 3 members of his family and their 7 servants (!) 6 of the 11 people staying there were sick.

Germ the poducer