EC Microbiology

Importance: Typhoid fever gravely sickened Orville Wright in 1896 and the disease killed his older brother, Wilbur, in 1912. The occurrence of typhoid fever among other Wright family members has never been explored.

Objective: To investigate the number of cases of typhoid fever in the Wright brothers’ family and determine if they had a predisposition to typhoid fever that might have had a genetic basis.

Methods: Biographical information concerning the Wright brothers was examined and a family tree was constructed. Using an estimated untreated case fatality rate of 20%, typhoid fever mortality data from decennial U.S. censuses (1850-1920) was converted to disease incidence rates from which individual and joint probabilities were determined. The medical literature was searched for genes associated with typhoid fever susceptibility.

Results: Nine Wright family members from three consecutive generations spanning 70 years were reported to have had typhoid fever. The joint probability that these nine separate cases could have occurred independently by chance alone was 8.57 x 10^-25. Multiple genes have been found in the medical literature which cause an increase in susceptibility to typhoid fever.

Conclusions and Relevance: The Wright brothers and their other family members who developed typhoid fever were highly likely to have had a genetic predisposition to this infection.

 Keywords: Wright Brothers; Typhoid Fever; Susceptibility; Genomics; Probability

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