Typhoid Mary

plural Typhoid Marys

1. A person who carries and spreads a dangerous disease, especially one who refuses to cooperate to minimize the risk of infection.

   “[…] Do you know what our great fear has been? That either the grayboys or the Ripley would find a Typhoid Mary, someone who could carry it and spread it without catching it him- or herself.”

   2001, Stephen King, Dreamcatcher, Simon and Schuster, →ISBN, page 356

   2 more examples

   As far as I can tell, Montezuma must have been some sort of Typhoid Mary. Even today, visitors to Mexico speak of catching a terrible affliction known as “Montezuma’s revenge,” which apparently causes violent, unrelenting bowel movements.

   2005, Annabelle du Fouet, “The murky world from whence it all came” (chapter 2), in Weather Balloons Make Rotten Sex Toys, Ellora's Cave, →ISBN, page 47

   And it was a Google executive – Sheryl Sandberg – who played the role of Typhoid Mary, bringing surveillance capitalism from Google to Facebook, when she signed on as Mark Zuckerberg’s number two in 2008.

   2019 January 20, John Naughton, quoting Shoshana Zuboff, “‘The goal is to automate us’: welcome to the age of surveillance capitalism”, in The Guardian