KEY POINTS:
Juerg Federspiel, best known outside his native Switzerland as the author of The Ballad of Typhoid Mary, has died. He was 75.
Federspiel worked as a journalist, film critic, essayist and fiction writer, publishing more than 20 novels and collections of stories.
His books were translated into six languages, and his best-known work in the English-speaking world is The Ballad of Typhoid Mary, based on the true story of a woman in early 20th century New York who refused to accept that she was the source of numerous outbreaks of typhoid fever.
Federspiel had been missing since mid-January and his body was found close to the border with France and Germany, officials in his hometown, Basel, said.
