Choking Death

The radio message from Halfway Valley, 180 miles northwest of Fort St. John, B.C., was brief and urgent. An epidemic of diphtheria had broken out in an Indian village on the Stoney River; 50-odd stricken natives needed help at once. From Whitehorse, Indian Affairs' Department Nurse Amy Wilson flew to Fort St. John; Nurse Aileen Bond started out from Dawson Creek, B.C. Last week the British Columbia Health Department released Nurse Bond's report on their three-week-long fight against the disease.

By truck, sleigh, and on horseback, Nurse Wilson had plowed through deep snowdrifts, was finally guided into the Indian camp by the smoke of a funeral pyre that signaled another death that day. The only visible signs of life were half-starved, whimpering dogs and wisps of smoke curling from tent tops. Inside the infested canvas tepees and unchinked log shelters, Miss Wilson's flashlight picked out three acutely ill Indians. Two of the victims had almost complete membranes covering their throats, slowly choking them to death. The third had just had a similar membrane removed by another Indian who had reached in with a pair of pliers, yanked it out and was proudly saving it for a souvenir.

Until Nurse Bond arrived six days later, Miss Wilson made daily trips on snowshoes between her base camp four miles away and the Indian camp, where she was finally permitted to administer antitoxin to the hypodermic-shy natives. As she won the Indians' confidence, she learned that a 60-year-old woman had first come down with diphtheria in October. After that the disease had spread from tepee to tepee; three victims had already died. With antitoxin and penicillin strapped to their bodies to keep the drugs from freezing in the 40DEG-below weather, the two nurses examined 52 patients a day. For ten days, broth or hot brandy and sugar was the only nourishment many of the Indians got. Later, more drugs were dropped by an R.C.A.F. plane and food was hauled in. In the windowless, filthy hovels, modern nursing techniques were impossible. Said Nurse Bond: "It was not the easiest thing to look professional in Arctic regalia, crawling into a tepee on hands & knees and having to squat on the saliva-spattered ground while the smoke from the bonfire blinded one. Our favorite expression soon became klootna-kloon [too much smoke] . . . and it was flattering to enter the wigwams and be greeted with chai-wootcha [good woman] . .."

With or without the professional look, Nurses Wilson and Bond had won a battle. Of all the cases reported thus far, there have been only five deaths; the health department announced last week that the diphtheria epidemic was under control.

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