Fast and furious polio ravaged defenceless people

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 12/04/2009 (6255 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

THE polio outbreak in 1948-’49 on the western shore of Hudson Bay spread fast and furious among a people that had very few defences against the virus carried in by white men.

The virus is documented to have been carried from Churchill by a man named Tutu to Chesterfield Inlet. Having finished the summer hunt, he went to trade ivory carvings in Churchill, according to the narrative laid out in Arctic Doctor, the 1955 book of Dr. Joseph P. Moody, a young doctor fresh out of school, who would find himself at the epicentre of the polio outbreak.

Tutu traded with soldiers at Churchill and then wended his way home, through the coastal camps.

Tutu did not get sick, Moody wrote, but the polio virus incubating among the Inuit people exploded with a ferocity that befuddled the medical community and defied diagnosis for months.

Doctors were fooled by its virulence, quick spread and rapid and high death rate.

Father Charles Choque, then an Oblate missionary in the Eastern Arctic, remembers he left Chesterfield Inlet by dog team with Inuit guide Honore Adgak on Nov. 29, 1948, to visit Pierre Nauyark and Mathilda Uyaralak and baptize a son, Andre Siudluk, born Sept. 19.

According to contemporary notes made by the Oblates and the Grey Nuns who ran the St. Theresa hospital at Chesterfield Inlet, Father Choque found a terrible sickness had swept through a camp along the way 10 days earlier, striking people with dry throat and tongue and paralysis. Five died between Nov. 16 and Nov. 18.

Moody went inland to investigate the sickness. One victim was sent to Winnipeg for a diagnosis, which came back as Guillain-Barre syndrome — a conclusion that proved wrong.

On Dec. 4, missionary notes record, the body of Victor Hakuluk was taken to Chesterfield Inlet from the camp Choque had visited.

On his way home to London, Ont., for Christmas vacation, Moody took autopsy specimens to Winnipeg.

There, he met Dr. Andrew Rhodes, leader of a polio research team at Toronto’s Connaught Medical Research Laboratories, who gave him technical papers of his work on poliomyelitis. As Moody settled in at home to read papers, a telegram arrived: "Several cases of strange illness and death please return."

Moody, examining an RCMP constable’s paralysis, recognized the classic "drop foot" symptom of polio.

The notes of the missionaries and nuns record that three more Inuit died on Feb. 21 and quarantine was declared. Within two weeks, another 11 deaths were recorded. On March 6, 13 were flown south for medical care. On Aug. 21, another six were to be flown to Winnipeg on the ill-fated Canso. The missionary records note a requiem service was held in Chesterfield Inlet on Aug. 25.

In the mid-1900s, Inuit people in the high north still lived on the land. Igloos in the winter and tents in the summer served their nomadic lifestyle well.

The Inuit were distrustful and fearful of white authorities. Their only real contact with outsiders was with Hudson Bay post agents, traders, with missionary priests — Oblates in the Eastern Arctic — Grey Nuns and the occasional explorers. They were wary of RCMP and doctors were strangers bearing foreign tools and medicine. Dr. Moody says after the plane crash, the Inuit people refused to go south for treatment, dealing another blow to his efforts to contain the polio.

He estimated that if this virulent strain had hit New York City, four million people would have fallen sick, 400,000 would have died within 10 days, another 1.12 million would have been paralyzed at least partially.

Of the 300 in the immediate area, Dr. Moody reported half got sick, five per cent died and 14 were paralyzed.

In a few short years, a polio epidemic would grip much of Canada, with Manitoba at its epicentre. The week of Aug. 15, 1952, Manitoba recorded 220 cases alone and a total of 3,156 in 1952-’53.

Within a couple of years, scientists developed a vaccine. Today, polio is still circulating but largely in the Third World and health organizations speak of universal vaccination to irradicate it.